


Places We Met After

by In_Forgetting



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Billy Hargrove is a Mess, Character Development, Developing Relationship, Drinking, Enemies to Friends, F/M, Fluff, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Multi, No more monsters only growing up AU, Polyamory, Post-Season 2, Sometimes smut but mostly not, started pre-season 3
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2020-04-06 08:40:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 60,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19059148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/In_Forgetting/pseuds/In_Forgetting
Summary: Follow Nancy, Steve, Jonathan, and sometimes Billy through the three years after the world didn't end. They talk, they laugh, they grow and they fall in love, however that works out at the time.





	1. January 1985

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nancy finds Steve at a party, there is teenage drinking, scandal! Jonathan stays in like the homebody he is. Billy has to track Steve down in the library. The mood for this chapter is "messy but I'm feelin' good".

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The adventure begins! I started writing this right after season 2 and we start off there as well, as such this will not incorporate season 3. This story is going to follow the characters over the next three years, so expect a slow burn. Warning: Billy is a problem child who corners Steve at school and doesn't respect boundaries.

**SYZYGY**  
/ˈsizijē/  
noun (Astronomy)  
The relationship between 3 or more celestial bodies when they come into alignment 

\---

**Steve**

It was Carlie Holton’s New Year’s Party and Nancy was there.

Which was fine.

In case anyone wanted to know, it was fine. Steve barely noticed that she wasn’t with Jonathan, hardly cared that she was wearing that pale blue sweater he liked on her so much, and he really just didn’t mind if they ended up in the same room at the same time.

Which was why he was currently outside, with a cigarette but without a coat despite the fact he hadn’t actually smoked in ages (he got enough second hand these days, but that was another matter). Everything was A-OK with him, just ask him.

But no one did, and that was probably for the best.

It was too cold for snow, a crisp and still kind of night that made the darkness deeper and painted everything in navy shadows. The back porch had been crowded when he’d first come out, but now everyone had retreated back in, shivering. He abandoned the halo of light the windows let spill across the back yard to go sit on Carlie’s old swing set. Steve could see his breath in puffs of steam and didn’t bother with actually smoking the cigarette, instead just watching it burn down in the darkness. His fingers were going numb.

It wasn’t that big of a deal when he boiled it down, she was just a girl. Her love had defined him for a while, it redeemed him, and then it wasn’t there anymore, and he still was. He wasn’t good because she loved him, he was just good. Her absence still stung though.

When he was being particularly transparent, Jonathan’s absence stung too.

The ember of his cigarette was about to reach the filter when the crunch of frosted grass came up behind him and Nancy settled into the swing next to him. She sat heavy and tilted her head up towards the sky before she looked at him with a sigh.

It occurred to him that it wasn’t her physical absence that stung.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” he answered back, trying to sound cavalier. He blamed it on his frozen lips when it came out like a question.

“You should come inside,” she said, leaning her swing towards his with her hips, pressing her feet into the frozen ground.

“Nah, I’m good,” he tossed the cigarette down and crushed it beneath the toe of his shoe. His toes were numb too, good to know.

He put a lot of work into not looking at her, while she was putting a lot of work into looking at him, twisting in the swing. It was because he wasn’t looking at her that it was such a surprise when her swing collided hard with his.

“What the hell, Nancy!” he yelped.

“Come inside, don’t be stubborn just because it’s me,” she said, standing in front of him holding her hand out.

She swayed a little on her feet and he could feel her buzz mirrored in his. Though he couldn’t bother pretending that it was the alcohol that made him take her hand with his numb fingers. Nancy helped him up but let his hand slip from hers, and he was reminded of the last party they’d been at together. Was that only October? It felt like a lifetime.

“You’re a mean drunk,” Steve said folding his arms around himself, feeling the cold more acutely now that he was headed for warmth.

Nancy hummed, smiling and tucked her arm into the crook of his elbow like it belonged there.

“And you should know better than to go mope all by yourself in the dark,” she chided airily and he realized all at once why she’d come after him.

A friend alone at the edge of the party, out in the dark.

He winced at the parallel, a twist of anxiety grabbing beneath his lungs, trying to haul him back in time. Steve looked back over his shoulder like he expected a demodog to be nipping at their heels and he nearly tripped over the bottom step of the porch. Nancy kept hold of him, though she stumbled right along with him.

“It’s fine,” she whispered, “You’re fine.”

But he couldn’t feel it until the glass of the back door separated them from the chill. Back inside a lit house, amongst the thrum and chatter of a party, it still seemed impossible that monsters existed, even when they knew better. Steve rubbed his hands together, blowing heat into them, the feeling that returned was a violent sting of protest as circulation came back. He looked at Nancy over his hands, about to speak when she tugged his elbow, keeping it like a prize.

“Let’s get a drink.”

Steve didn’t move right away and she tugged again, like she knew she could move him if she waited.

“Where’s Jonathan?” he asked, because he hoped to remind them both.

“These things aren’t really his scene,” Nancy replied and she didn’t look embarrassed, or resentful, or away.

A beat too long passed and she laughed, “Do I need a chaperone to sit with you? Is that where we’re at, Steve?”

Fuck it.

They found a quiet corner, which turned out to be the laundry room, of all places. Nancy and Steve both perched on top of the dryer, their feet dangling down as they sipped at cups of _something_ – why a party meant dumping everything in a bowl and calling it a drink was beyond Steve. There was a reason it was called ‘punch’. He usually stuck with beer, but one bad decision deserved another.

Only it didn’t start off like a bad decision. He’d forgotten what making her really laugh felt like. The way she threw her head back and folded up with it. She was so much her own person, he didn’t think he’d ever meet anyone like her again, and it made him glad for this because something would be missing from his life without her.

When Steve would look back on that moment, he wondered if he’d ever hone any sort of danger sense or if he’d just spend his life perpetually taken off guard.

“I don’t not love you, you know,” Nancy said, not looking at him but instead staring intently at a box of laundry detergent.

Silence filled in all the spaces between them, and all the space in Steve’s lungs, until he was keenly aware he was drowning in it.

“Excuse me?”

Maybe he’d misheard her, or maybe it was his fault for letting her box him into a small room full of white fixtures that hooked up to running water during a party. Maybe she couldn’t help herself in these conditions. A werewolf except with heart stopping conversations.

Nancy shifted and looked at him, and he wondered how she could move when he was frozen.

“Everyone was always telling me that when you love someone – they’re the only one who matters,” Nancy began. “But – when I was with you, I knew I loved Jonathan, and so I thought I didn’t love you properly.”

She’d fixed her gaze on him with too much intensity now and he couldn’t help but wince but she grabbed his sleeve, keeping him there.

“But now I’m with Jonathan and I know I love you.”

Steve searched her face, looking for a clue that he was following along properly, something to make sense of.

“You’re breaking up with Jonathan?”

“No – I love Jonathan.”

“I thought you just said you love me.”

“Yes, I do.”

“…Like a friend?”

“Oh, don’t be stupid.”

Steve’s brow furrowed and he stared at her, amazed at her gall.

“So – what? You’re telling me you can’t make up your mind?” he demanded, frustrated.

It was supposed to be an attack but she nodded furiously. “Exactly!”

Steve spluttered indignantly, hopping down off the dryer, but she kept her hold on his sleeve.

“What the hell am I supposed to do with that, Nancy?” he implored when her light hold kept him there.

 _“You?”_ she laughed, but it was the kind of laugh that comes from being up too long, from fighting too hard, a nail-bat-in-hand-but-completely-helpless kind of laugh. “What am _I_ supposed to do with that? I mean, fucking hell, let me know when you figure it out because it would be great to know,” she said, letting his sleeve go and folding herself over on top of the dryer. Her skirt hitched up and her hair fanned out, looking exhausted.

“Don’t you remember what it was like just a little bit before you and I got together?” Nancy asked. “When we were all hanging out together? Wasn’t that - wasn’t it good? Don’t you miss it?”

There had been a brief stretch, a heady sort of false security with evil defeated and the rest of their lives ahead of them where they’d all just sort of folded in on one another. They were the only ones who knew. And though Jonathan wouldn’t wander far from Will, they’d spent a lot of time in the Byer’s backyard. Or piled on Jonathan’s bed while he played them music. Steve didn’t remember them ever calling him up – or him calling them – they were just pulled together with the magnetic force of all that had transpired.

Shared trauma, binding them all together.

Steve shrugged, noncommittal, and leaned back against the wall across from her. He’d gotten spooked, the brush of Jonathan’s knee against his had become as much of a distraction as Nancy’s laugh – and it had freaked him out. Steve hadn’t been trying to push Jonathan away, just pull Nancy closer, use how he felt about her as a shield so he wouldn’t have to think about it. Sure he’d looked at guys, but at the time he’d never been so close, on the edge of having to say something, or worse; having to do something.

“I miss it,” Nancy sighed.

“You just have to pick, Nancy, that’s all there is to it. Life sucks like that.”

“Do we?”

_We._

Had she caught him staring? Perhaps they shared some sort of mind meld after everything they’d been through.

Pulling Nancy out of their tangle had only put him on the outside, it hadn’t solved anything. Especially not the looking. What was it Billy said to him? Plenty of fish in the sea.

Did they have to pick? Could they just stay that same tangle on Jonathan’s bed listening to David Bowie? He’d say it was impossible, but they’d had to push monsters back into a hell mouth twice now so his notion of impossible had become looser. Honestly, it was cracked open and bleeding out. The more he saw of life the more he felt completely unprepared.

“I can’t sneak around like that.”

“I’m not asking you to sneak around - we’d all be in on it - _in_ it.”

Above them, the continuous white noise of the party had hushed and the sound of excited voices in unison began.

10,

9,

“Like a threesome?” he asked.

8,

“But like… with everything,” Nancy pushed herself up again.

7,

“Can we do that?”

6,

“I don’t think anyone could stop us.”

5,

“Have you talked to Jonathan?”

4,

“Sort of.”

3,

“What did he say?”

2,

“To kiss you at midnight.”

1.

A cacophony of noise sounded above them, cheering and noise makers and an off tune chorus of some song everyone knows but Steve didn’t know the name of.

“No, he didn’t,” Steve laughed.

“He did. He said you’re a romantic and you’d go for that,” Nancy retorted.

“Fuck off.”

Nancy hopped down off the dryer and the house above them screamed in the New Year. She reached out and took his hand. She held onto him like she knew he’d move if she waited.

**Jonathan**

The phone rang, and it still made everyone in the house tense. Though, if there was anything in the world that would let the Byers family relax besides industrial sedatives pumped into the air supply, Jonathan would be all ears.

“Hello?” He was the first to the phone, his mother staring at him out of the corner of her eye.

“Hey, Nancy.” His mother looked away when he grinned at the phone.

“Happy New Year! Guess who’s here,” Nancy chorused, and he could tell she was drunk, but more importantly she sounded happy and Jonathan spared a glance at his mother before putting more of the wall between them, going deeper into the kitchen.

“Hi Steve,” Jonathan answered by way of a guess.

“Happy New Year, man,” Steve’s voice was all the confirmation he needed.

Jonathan closed his eyes, imagining them sharing the phone between them; Nancy leaned up against a kitchen counter, her fingers curled in the cord, and Steve having to bend some to listen in at the earpiece.

“Yeah, same to you guys. You having fun?”

“Pretty fun. Steve wouldn’t let me kiss him though.”

 _“Nance,”_ Steve hissed.

Jonathan laughed. “Damn, I thought he would have gone for that.”

“Nah, he’s got ‘morals’,” Nancy sighed like this was a travesty.

“Gross, tell him we’ve had ours removed.”

There was a brief moment where Nancy was talking away from the phone and Jonathan could hear more of the party than of them. Then, all of the sudden, it was Steve’s voice coming clear through the line.

“You’re okay with this?”

Jonathan shrugged before he realized that Steve couldn’t see him doing that. “I won’t know that until we’ve gotten into it a bit,” he could feel himself flush at how that sounded. He didn’t mean it like _that._

Nancy had wrung his hand out talking about it. Over and over she’d told him she still loved him, but he knew that. Which was honestly the more puzzling part, he wasn’t used to having faith in anything and now he was putting his money down on love? That fickle thing? On a girl who told him she didn’t want to choose? It seemed stupid. Maybe he was setting himself up for failure, a self-destructive streak everyone could say they saw coming a mile away… Or maybe this thing could work, because she loved him, he loved her, and the rest didn’t matter.

And if it had to be anyone, of course it was Steve.

Things would be weird, _they_ would be weird, but weird was where Jonathan lived. It might have been a revelation to Nancy and Steve, but Jonathan was no stranger to being outside of what everyone else deemed acceptable. The part that would take adjusting to was surety, that sounded like a pipe dream to him.

“Are _you_ okay with it?” Jonathan returned. He wouldn’t let Steve get between them if that’s all this was to him.

Steve was quiet.

“Screw it. Yeah,” Steve said, sounding baffled by his own resolution.

“Lemme talk to him,” Nancy spoke, her voice still sounding far from the phone, but he could see her reaching for it, reaching for him. He felt himself being passed off.

“Slay together, stay together!” Steve called now that he was the one in the distance, Nancy laughed, in the foreground, her smile at his ear again.

Jonathan smiled too. They were drunk idiots.

“Hey, are you going to bed?” Nancy asked.

“Yeah, probably.”

“Okay, I wanted to say goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Nancy,” Jonathan chuckled. “It doesn’t have to be at midnight, you know. Let him walk you home, let him kiss you.”

“I love you.”

“I know.”

When he hung up he waited for regret, the sinking feeling of a mistake, but all he had was the sound of her smile when she came back to the phone.

**Nancy**

They were all going to meet at the edge of the woods.

It seemed like the right place, it held so many other secrets that Nancy felt like they could trust this one to the branches as well.

The word ‘greedy’ had been rattling itself around her head like a pinball, knocking hard and skittering into other things. Interrupting other thoughts. Occasionally it would scrape up on other words, like ‘insensitive’ and ‘desperate’, but for the most part the record kept skipping on ‘greedy’.

How dare she want them both back even if they both wanted her. Too good for the cul-de-sac Nancy Wheeler. What a Princess.

But she’d dare anyone not to fall in love with them both. Steve with his lanky lack of ego, and Jonathan, so introspective that when he brought you into his world, you felt blessed.

There was a moment, right after it had happened the first time; it had felt like it would have taken a lifetime to fix the Byers’ house back to the way it was, but it only took a few weeks when they’d all pitched in. Nancy came back into the living room from getting water. Everyone was there but Jonathan and Steve sat together, spattered in a mess of paint and plaster. Steve was telling some story, talking with his hands, making everyone laugh.

Jonathan had been mostly smiling quietly beside Steve while he picked at some latex paint on his thumb. He looked up, reached out and pulled a shred of wallpaper from Steve’s hair, murmuring some comment that pulled Steve’s attention away from his audience.

There was still a shadow of bruising on Steve’s cheekbone, but he smiled at Jonathan with total trust.

When it happened, she thought she was just pleased that they were getting along finally. She knew better now, knew she didn’t just love them individually but loved them together as well. Nancy knew now she was lost, but really after all the things she had been lately: bait, monster hunter, detective, champion – she could handle lost. It felt normal, even if the circumstances were far from it.

The world had woken up briefly in a premature thaw, the sort of weather that made her hopeful for spring. In that tentative optimism, she could see them working out. She leaned up against a fence post, nudging at some stubborn wet snow with the toe of her boot while she waited.

The sky was bright with afternoon sun, though it was dispersed over an even covering of clouds, turning the world above her into a single pane of uninterrupted frosted white glass. But even in daylight, with her back to the woods, she felt her palms tingle with trepidation.

Nerves.

Right...?

They arrived at the same time from different directions, Nancy waiting in the middle while they came to her. Eventually they were all within touching distance and everyone kept their hands buried in their pockets. There was the stiff sort of reception of a first meeting, or the first meeting after a fight, everything different so quickly. Nancy chewed her lip and Jonathan found that same stubborn patch of snow to nudge at. Nancy looked between them and felt the nerves settle into her joints, buzzing in all the places she was put together. It was Steve who unfolded his arms first and pushed his sunglasses up onto his head.

“So are we going for this walk?” he asked, backing towards the break in the fence. “Can’t make me feel like a third wheel when we’re a trike,” he teased.

Nancy was grateful for his showman assertiveness that came with his popularity, even when he felt over his head, he waded out. She stepped forward to follow him, turning her head to watch Jonathan as she started moving and he remained still.

“You too, Jonny,” Steve prompted and Jonathan grimaced.

“I’m coming but you aren’t calling me Jonny,” he said following them both as they carried on into the border of the trees.

“Fair deal,” Steve replied easily, nudging his sunglasses back on his face.

The forest had been stripped of leaves and looked strange, like a sepia photo, all tones of brown. Despite the melting snow and the damp chill in the wind, everything looked dried out and barren in the bright sunshine, the secret nooks of the landscape exposed to them. The three of them were a smattering of muted colour.

The silence that fell between them left that record in Nancy’s head skipping, her pulse keeping nervous rhythm to the tune. And yet? Here they were. Whether it would work or not, here they all were. Nancy reached out to both of them, she found Steve’s hand first, having to dig Jonathan’s from his pocket.

“Alright! That’s enough awkward, we have gone through way worse _._ We can figure this shit out, no sweat,” Nancy spoke up, her own brand of bravado leaving her lips.

“It’s not so different from before, is it?” she asked, looking between them both, her hair cut tickling the edges of her jaw. “Actually, it’s kind of spooky how much like last time it is…” she muttered.

“Should we put in bets on when the world is going to crack open next?” Steve asked.

“If it didn’t feel like betting against my brother I’d say give it ‘til September,” Jonathan said.

Nancy felt an uneasy squirm like something was breathing on the back of her neck, a cool breeze moved her hair and the chill left goosebumps on her skin. She felt suddenly sensitive and raw beneath her clothes, and let out a forced laugh.

“No frickin’ way,” she said with a sort of finality she didn’t intend. She crammed her hands into her pockets while still hoarding their hands in hers. It closed their ranks, one of their shoulders brushed each of hers.

“How was Christmas for you guys?” she asked, the change of subject was obvious, but they let her.

She just wanted to move forward, push head long into something good instead of dwelling in… well, all the rest.

They talked tests and time apart, Nancy’s troubles with staying focused without mentioning all that had transpired to cause it, the music Jonathan had discovered, and the fact that Steve was graduating that year. Eventually they found a fallen tree where Nancy took a seat and Jonathan joined her. For a while, Steve wandered around the area, unable to sit still, climbing in the branches of the nearest tree while Nancy and Jonathan watched, but eventually he came down, walking back to them, standing in front of them with his hands in his pockets.

“Is it too early to kiss you?” he asked, his cheeks flushed with the cold but also maybe something else. It was hard to read his face exactly with his sunglasses on. She felt a strange sort of thrill, the idea that something was desperately wanted but not allowed. But they were making it allowed - she felt reckless with power.

“You kissed her on the way home from New Years,” Jonathan pointed out and Steve took a step back with a shrug, a sudden hesitation in his posture.

“He means you’ve already started, so it’s not too early, right?” Nancy said, looking at Jonathan, who nodded. She smiled at knowing him and reached out to rub his arm.

Steve was still quiet, regarding his shoes. “Well, I just mean, I’ve never done it in front of him...”

Jonathan interrupted with a derisive splutter of laughter, “You practically ate each other’s faces in the hall every day when you two were going out.” Nancy nudged him in the ribs, mostly because there were kinder ways to say that.

Steve gaze remained on the ground, the sunglasses gave away nothing. Were the tops of his ears flushed or was it just the chill? Quietly, Steve said, “And I didn’t just mean Nance.”

The quiet of the forest was so complete around them, the bugs not yet awake despite the thaw, the hush of it made you feel that you could hear for miles. A bird took off somewhere and they could hear the beat of its wings. Nancy could hear her own pulse and Jonathan’s complete surprise in the absence of noise. The steady breathing of all three of them.

All three of them.

Steve took off his sunglasses, tucking them into a jacket pocket, and Nancy could tell that Steve’s record had stuck on that same track. She stood right away before he could say anything else, or apologize for wanting to kiss them both, and pressed her lips to his. She cupped his face, her hands were cold and his skin was warm and his kiss was familiar like the first warm summer rain, a thing almost forgotten and missed so deeply, though the thought of it had rarely come up. He wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her close.

When they separated, her forehead pressed to his, and they panted softly against each other’s lips. Eventually she drew back properly and looked over to Jonathan. He was still watching them, which she thought he would be, and she gave him a wry smile. He didn’t like public displays of affection, but they weren’t in public.

“You don’t have to if you’re not ready,” she pointed out, going over to Jonathan, taking his hand in hers and kissing him softly at the corner of his mouth. Steve’s kiss still tingled on her lips. That same thrill of something that wasn’t allowed lingered in her fingertips, in her chest.

Nancy had kissed Steve because she loved him, and because she loved Jonathan and knew he would need a moment to process Steve’s question. Jonathan stood without speaking and crossed to Steve, but kept Nancy’s hand in his. “It’s not too soon.”

It was probably uncomfortable for Jonathan to keep her hand in his. When she stood back, not wanting to crowd their moment, she squeezed his fingers when he gripped her tight.

This was where they bent the universe to their will though, not when they were fighting monsters but right here with these two boys in small town Indiana. Nancy felt her heart flutter a nervous rhythm as they drew closer; the closer they came, the greater the charge in the air, like trying to force the same poles of a magnet together.

Steve leaned in, taller than both of them, he’d always have to duck a little to kiss them. Nancy wondered if this was how he looked when he leaned in to kiss her. Both of them kept their eyes just barely open, watching each other through their lashes. Jonathan drew back a little, and so did Steve, that inch or so that separated their lips could have been a mile.

Steve eventually let out a breathless laugh, moving to stand at his full height, giving up, when Jonathan pressed up on his toes, meeting their lips, his free hand on the back of Steve’s neck. It was brief and chaste in comparison, their mouths not really lingering together long, though Steve followed him down before they separated.

Instead of letting them retreat into themselves, Nancy stepped in, kissing them both because it was allowed, and it was good, and they were three now. It wasn’t the kiss that made it so but the intention, the decision of it, and it felt so palpable after their lips had met.

They were three.

**Billy**

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’ve been avoiding me,” Billy hummed, his frame taking up the only escape in a dead end row of books labelled ‘Natural History’. Billy usually took the opportunity to talk to Steve out on the court, but he couldn’t seem to get near him. Steve had become a slut for passing the ball and vanishing from the showers like he was allergic to water. So he’d tracked him down in the library. It had taken some doing, considering Billy was supposed to be in math at that time.

Steve looked at him like he was a rabbit cornered by a wild dog. Big brown eyes all startled, and his mouth curved into an ‘O’. It was a good look for him.  

“I’m getting back together with Nancy,” Steve said, shifting on his feet like he couldn’t keep still to save his life.

“My condolences on the loss of your balls, Harrington. What does that have to do with me?” Billy asked, cocking his head to the side, playing dumb because it made Steve squirm to say it, to own up to it, and the view of King Steve squirming like a virgin was not one Billy ever grew tired of.  

Steve flushed, carding an anxious hand through dark and impossible hair. “We can’t – this thing – we gotta stop,” Steve managed, his face flushing a deep red.

“Ohhhh,” Billy sighed thoughtfully, sucking against his teeth, making a softly admonishing noise.

“You could have just said,” Billy pushed off the shelf he’d been leaning on, closing the space between them. Slow, liquid movements like a predator. Steve stepped back but ran into the wall fairly quickly. When Steve ran out of room he nudged himself into the corner and Billy didn’t stop until he was crowded uncomfortably close in Steve’s space.

He tilted his head to catch Steve’s eye and rested an elbow on the nearest shelf. Steve responded to this by leaving the stack of heavy books he had in his arms between them like a wall.

“Don’t want to piss off your _girlfriend,_ have her lock her knees shut,” Billy crooned, he could smell hair spray and Steve’s cinnamon toothpaste. He reached out and pushed the books out of the way, Steve let them go to the floor. They fell beside them with heavy thuds and Steve kept his gaze as though transfixed, looking away meant he might miss something.  
  
“I have this theory though…” Billy smiled, his voice lowering to a rumble, letting it purr out of him like something filthy. “I think you’re avoiding me ‘cause you’re a cock-hungry slut and you don’t trust yourself around me. You don’t _really_ want to stop… do you, pretty boy?” Billy hummed, and Steve was radiating heat from his embarrassment. The library was quiet and he was so close to Steve he could hear the quiet kiss of a noise that was Steve wetting his lower lip.

“We are at school right now - broad daylight,” Steve began when he found his voice, a whisper that was very quickly silenced as Billy clapped his palm over Steve’s mouth.

“That’s not a ‘no’,” Billy purred, and his other hand made disturbingly quick work of the clasp of Steve’s jeans, his eyes widened and he squirmed but Billy just leaned against him, keeping him in place as he slipped a hand down the front of his pants.

Steve was hard before Billy’s hand pressed to him. Billy raised an eyebrow at him accusingly while his fingers traced out the line of him through the material of his underwear. Billy didn’t have to see them to know the striped Calvin’s Steve wore. Pressed against him, he could feel the tremor in his frame that was his knees trying to buckle from the touch.

It was over in a few muffled mewls behind Billy’s palm, his other hand stroking him off while he watched the frantic look in Steve’s eyes. Steve didn’t fight to push him off, and he didn’t fight the edge of his orgasm either. He squirmed like a virgin but Steve was a slut. Through and through.

“So, yeah, stay away princess. Far away, for as long as you can stand it, but I’ll see you around,” Billy hummed, recollecting his hand, wiping it against Steve’s thigh even though he’d gotten him off in the confines of his briefs. With a smirk he finally stepped away from him to turn on his heel and leave Steve a panting mess.

“Fuck you,” Steve breathed, wiping his mouth like he was trying to smear Billy’s touch off of him.

 Billy grinned back at him before he turned the edge of the bookshelf. “Say hi to your girlfriend for me.”


	2. February 1985

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's nearly Valentine's Day and Steve can't stay away from Billy. That causes problems, but everyone's willing to try and work through them. Who doesn't love talking about feelings? Fun times! Billy is awful, Steve is a little weak, Jonathan is confused and Nancy will have no bullshit on her watch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Billy continues to ignore boundaries, safe words and general manners in this chapter.

**Billy**

Steve held out a lot longer than Billy had expected. Long enough that Billy had started to get the itch, that wall-crawling, chain-smoking, can’t-reach-it-with-your-hand kind of itch. It didn’t help that no one in Hawkins had ever heard of cruising. Part of him considered that a good thing; he wasn’t stupid, when he did stupid things he could call them what they were, but a much louder part of him just _wanted_ so badly he thought he’d burn up with it. A louder part still said wanting in the first place was disgusting. And so on, and so on.

He was a nesting doll of bullshit a lot of the time.

It was just more obvious to him when he didn’t have Steve under him, his shoulders pressed to that sliver of space that was neither window nor door in the back seat of the Camaro. It was an uncomfortable squeeze but it wasn’t about comfort, it was about Billy getting what he wanted.

Steve had never known what to do with the power of his charisma, not really. They called him King Steve, but he hadn’t _used_ it. What was power if you didn’t use it? How did you know you had any if you couldn’t see it in the people around you with that little bit of fear? Without fear you had no loyalty, and without loyalty it was too easy for someone else to come and take it. Like Billy took it, and held it over him, and pinned him in the back by his throat with it.

Also with his hand, but that was just because he looked gorgeous when he gaped at him, eyes wet, breathless. Some people were just made to have their power taken away.

“You caved so quick, princess,” Billy tutted, even though it had been much too long for him. Steve didn’t have the breath to protest, and he didn’t even look ashamed of himself. He wouldn’t break eye contact. When Billy eased up on Steve’s windpipe, his eyes rolled back with the privilege of a full breath and the heady rush made Billy’s fingers tingle and the compressed motions of his hips push further, grind deeper.

The air between them smelled of the salt of sweat like sea spray and the musk of sex, thick and humid, fogging the glass. Steve moaned, his hands gripped at Billy shirt where it still clung to his shoulders, the buttons open.

“You’re always going to cave, aren’t you? ‘Cause you’re a slut. If only your girl could see you now.”

Steve hadn’t given in all at once, no, he’d slowly let himself back into his presence. Back on the court, back in the change rooms, until finally he was back in the showers. That was probably what tipped the scales. It’s hard not to imagine fucking someone when they’re naked and dripping wet in a steamed room in front of you.

“Can we not talk about Nancy?” Steve panted.

“Can’t keep it up when I talk about your girlfriend?” Billy teased. He couldn’t help it, it was such an obvious sore spot that begged to be prodded. Steve glared at him a little. It was hard to look morally superior while taking a cock, though. “That’s alright, I don’t need you to finish.”

Steve rolled his eyes and rocked back into the thrusts as much as he could, moving his grip up into Billy’s hair, the tug on his scalp making him growl. Steve started making these noises that made Billy’s mouth go dry, those perfect little ‘right there’ mewling sounds that had him dizzy. Teasing was forgotten and getting more of those noises from him, making him louder, more desperate, became the priority.

Steve’s back arched, his head tipped back. His pleasure took up so much space that it was hard to breathe and there was no room back there, they were trapped and gasping together. Billy couldn’t help but put his hand back over Steve’s throat, to squeeze and feel the skin beneath his hand. He could feel him so close, in the way his hips bucked and his body tensed, he was right on the very edge. Billy was happy to walk him to the edge with the choice of ‘shove Billy off and don’t finish’ or ‘cum and possibly pass out’. The gasping, desperate way he chose release over air would have been something to gloat about if the look on his face hadn’t fully tipped Billy into his own orgasm. His grip slipped as he came and he felt Steve both gasp in a full blissful lungful and streak the humid space between their bodies as he came only a second later. A breath later.

Billy could hear nothing but rushing in his ears for a moment, he blinked spots back from his vision and sat back to survey his handiwork. Steve’s chest rose and fell in heavy breath, marked with sweat and his cum, his dark eyes were unfocused and his jaw a little slacked. Ruined. Just as he should be.  
  
Billy reached out to pat his cheek a little harder than could be deemed affectionate. “Hope it was worth it.”

**Steve**

Rigid rules had never really worked for Steve. He liked to be flexible, to move around in the grey area. Or at least… he had a lot of trouble with rigid rules, things always seemed to get away from him when he had to stick to a plan. This whole three-way-relationship thing fit nicely into that. A strange framework he got to maneuver around. Things weren’t as simple as when it had just been Nancy, and in that complexity there was room, some slack in the rope.

Enough to hang himself, some might say. He was inclined to agree as he checked the bruises on his neck in his bathroom mirror.

He had room, sure, but he was almost entirely certain that Billy fell on the wrong side of a hard line. One Steve seemed incapable of toeing for long. The fact that he was possibly mucking up one of the best things that had ever happened to him was new, but the cloying, hot feeling of shame wasn’t.

The whole ridiculous thing had started before the bruises had faded from his very first experience of Billy’s body pressed over his, all ugly shades of green and brown on his cheek bones, though most of the swelling was over and done with.

Steve had done his best not to be alone with Billy. Which hadn’t been easy when he found himself alone a lot of the time when Nancy and Jonathan started dating, and Billy was everywhere. He was there on the court, and he was there in the showers, and he was there in the parking lot leaned against the hood of his stupid Camaro.

It was frustrating because he scared Steve. In that visceral and primal reaction one has to stay away from the things that hurt us. The hairs on the back of Steve’s neck raised when he saw him, his heart in his throat and his pulse hitting behind all those broken blood vessels, like Billy had hit on top of them. A stinging reminder from inside him to keep away, keep away, keep away.

He was rattled, and he hated it. He hated Billy Hargrove.

And so he kept away, despite the fact he was everywhere, and Billy was no help, seeming for all the world like he _wanted_ to be in Steve’s space. All cavalier arrogance even though Steve had it on good authority he’d been put in his place by a 13 year old girl. But Billy seemed to have this knack for always getting what he wanted, Steve recognized it because it used to be a talent he possessed. But things with hard rules, things with ‘always’ attached to them, seemed to get away from him.

So Steve was annoyed but not surprised when he went to search the locker room for his misplaced sunglasses and turned to find Billy leaned in the doorway.

“Don’t worry pretty boy, I didn’t do anything permanent,” Billy said, soft and deep, the kind of voice that could put you to sleep – whether in a lullaby sense or a veterinary sense, Steve couldn’t quite figure out. “You’re almost back to your gorgeous self.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Steve spat with as much venom as lips can manage to the fist that split them. He pushed past him, letting their shoulders hit up against each other. Billy stood solid, but let him pass. The contact hurt and his pulse whispered run, run, run in his ears – but he walked. Never run from a wild animal, it only makes them chase you.

“Now, where’s the fun in that?”

Steve’s feet stuttered in their quest to put as much distance as possible between himself and Billy. He looked back, not sure why right away, unsure if he’d really heard the invitation beneath those words. Billy hadn’t turned, but was looking over his shoulder, an infuriating smirk curving his profile.

How they’d gotten from there to the nearly nonexistent back seat of the Camaro was a little fuzzy to Steve. Things may have had a tendency to get away from him, but none had ever run quite so far as that. All the way to Steve straddled over Billy’s lap and Billy’s thumbs pressing into the pale bruises on his face just to hear him whimper.

Billy shushed him quietly, his breath on his skin, never easing up his touch. He smelled like cigarettes and cheap cologne and Steve could still smell it on the shirt he’d been wearing when he’d got home. He washed it three times over.

That had been the first time.

It kept happening, over and over and over. He’d twist his better judgement inside out and follow Billy to some new depravity.

Which brought him to February, and his most recent vacation from reason. Steve’s fingers experimentally lined up with the purple-red bruises on his throat, covering the little watercolour fingerprints, each smudge an echo of an illicit act. There was no way in Hell he could hide those from anyone, let alone Nancy or Jonathan. Billy’s unrepentant chuckle from behind a cigarette played in the back of his head and Steve absently tightened the grip he’d created at his throat, making the echo a little louder.

He dropped his hand and told his reflection, “You’re an idiot.”

Because he was.

Steve went and collected the phone from its cradle. He felt his pulse behind the bruises but tried to ignore the way it felt like running until he was out of breath. There was no running from this. Guilt would have eaten him alive even if Billy’s touch had remained invisible.

Ring.

Ring.

Whoever came up with the sound for a telephone was a sadist.

“Wheeler residence,” Nancy’s voice came, and Steve felt both relief and an anxious twist in the same cruel second.

“Hey, Nance,” Steve said, his voice strained. Billy hadn’t choked him _that_ hard.

Nancy was quiet for a moment, maybe because she was moving somewhere private. Steve hoped that was the case. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m gonna come pick you up in a minute to talk about that,” Steve said and winced at how terrifying that sounded even to his ears. “I’m not dying or anything.” _But you might kill me._

“Okay,” Nancy said, it was the sort of okay that waited for the rest of the information, the sort of okay that was okay until it wasn’t. Cautiously pessimistic.

“Okay,” Steve echoed, with the same cautious pessimism. This was all okay, until it wasn’t. And he wanted to ride with okay for as long as he could manage.

“I’ll be on the porch,” Nancy said when she realized he wasn’t going to say anything else on the phone.

Out front of her house Nancy reached over from the passenger seat and pushed up his chin with a crease in her brow. After that she settled in like she wanted to retract her ‘Okay’ and replace it with something stronger and more richly multisyllabic.

“Talk to me,” she said, when he expected her to yell. But of course she didn’t know what he’d done yet. Her voice didn’t waver but he could tell she was scared. He hadn’t meant to scare her.

“I did something stupid,” he said, his hands on the wheel, fingers sprawling and clenching on the surface. He couldn’t stop moving, he couldn’t look at her straight. He would turn himself inside out to take it back, but an ugly truth swam through him.

He wanted to do it again.

“Pretty normal so far,” Nancy coaxed, her voice playful but not light. The air in the car felt too heavy to breathe.

When he explained it, it made so much less sense than it did in his head. And it made no sense in his head.

Once he’d made it through the words he managed to look over at her. Nancy was an unreadable mask of _upset._ It seemed sad and it seemed scared and it seemed hurt and it seemed angry at him. Consequences were not something Steve had ever gathered a full grasp on. Right then it felt like he’d rather she just skin him than look at him like she was.

“You know it’s like, less than a week ‘til Valentine’s day, right?” she asked. Annoyed. She also looked annoyed.

Steve winced. He did realize. It also didn’t escape his notice that he had once tried to tear her down for a much lesser crime, and not enough time had elapsed for him to not be a gigantic hypocrite. He wished he’d brought her a can of spray paint. He wished that if he’d done that she would have used it.

Nancy scrubbed her face with the side of her hand and looked at him again.  

“Do you want to break up?” she asked. And though her voice did not shake and her eyes didn’t shimmer with tears, Steve could hear her trying not to cry. Her eyes were so blue it hardly seemed fair.

“No! No, I’m telling you this because I don’t want to break up,” Steve answered, turning to her properly. It sounded like a lie but he meant it so deeply; he loved her _and_ he wanted Billy, and both things were true at once. That sticky feeling of shame bubbled behind his ribs. He was such an idiot.

Her shoulders slacked a little, and she relaxed the tension that held her arms across her chest like her ribcage would pop open if she let it go. Nancy reached out, taking his hand in hers. She didn’t smile but the severity of her frown lessened, and it felt like the air became a little more breathable. The quiet seemed comfortable until Steve realized she was waiting for something else.

“…But?” she prompted and Steve blinked.

He hadn’t meant to say but, he wanted to wrap this up neatly and be done with it. Now that she’d prompted him though, he found himself answering against his better judgment.

“But… I might… want to do it again?”

Nancy squeezed his fingers. “Yeah, that sounds about right,” she sighed, rolling her eyes almost affectionately. The same sort of tone a pet owner would take when their dog got his head stuck between the bars of the railing.

Steve realized with a weak flutter in his chest that she was forgiving him. She was furious with him, baffled by his judgment, exasperated by his timing but forgiving him. He squeezed her hand between both of his, kissing her knuckles. She shook her head at the display but her frown ironed itself out a little further.

Nancy had been so brave coming to him with Jonathan like she had and he hadn’t even noticed. He hadn’t realized how long she must have run it through her head and picked out words, and before that, all the time she’d sat with the idea that they weren’t going to work out even though she wanted it to.

“Like I said,” she sighed, reaching out to pet his hair back with her other hand, short nails running against his scalp pleasantly. “Maybe we don’t have to choose.”

Steve leaned over to kiss her cheek, a series of small apologetic pecks. Between each one he breathed a “Thank you” against her skin.

“That’s a big _maybe!”_ she laughed, a physical laugh because he was tickling her not an emotional laugh of endearment, she nudged him back to his seat with a hand on his chest and her eyes were serious. “You still have to tell Jonathan about all this, you’re not putting that on me.”

“Right.” Three people. Two conversations. He should have picked them both up.  

“Even if he says yes there are going to have to be rules,” she pointed out.

Steve was not that good at rules but he nodded.

“Like he can’t keep doing that shit to you,” she said gesturing to his neck, looking briefly concerned and deeply angry, reaching out to smudge a thumb over one of the wine coloured bruises. “What did he do, choke you?”

Steve’s sudden loss of interest in eye contact was all the confirmation she needed, and she made a brief noise like an angry tea kettle or a squirrel or someone who was considering homicide as a viable option.

“Billy Hargrove,” she mused her nose wrinkling in abject disapproval. “You have shitty taste.”

He looked at her, big puppy dog eyes, purposefully doleful and contrite as he murmured, “Not always.”

Nancy pursed her lips together to keep from smiling at him, but Steve knew he’d won her over. Jonathan was a little more inclined towards lifelong grudges, but if Steve had Nancy on his side – at least partially – it would be easier.

**Jonathan**

The conversation Steve had brought to his doorstep did not go, by traditional definition, smoothly. Jonathan had a habit of backing away, hands up, from complications like this. He hadn’t ever thought of it as a _bad_ habit. But then again he didn’t think he had trust issues either, people just had issues with keeping his trust.

This was a prime example of that.  

Though really, he didn’t care that much that Steve was sleeping around, aside from the fact it upset Nancy. What bothered him was that they’d been at this a little more than a month and he was already rocking the boat; the notion made his palms itch. It would be so much easier to wash his hands clean of it all, but instead he’d folded them beneath his arms and listened.

They stood in his shed, because if he was going to do something unpleasant it might as well occur where his brother disappeared, and where they later interrogated him while he was possessed by evil from another dimension.

A February drizzle tapped at the windows and hung on to their shoulders and hair, needy and persistent. Jonathan leaned against an old table and listened. At first he was a little confused as to why he was being told this. It felt like something between Nancy and Steve. He and Steve weren’t… What weren’t they? Better question: What were they?

Eventually Steve finished his explanation, with Nancy’s help, and Jonathan remained quiet for a while. He’d spotted a spider spinning a web in the corner and let his thoughts get tangled in the threads before he looked at Steve. A feeling was percolating into being, but it wasn’t exactly formed, a consideration of an emotion. Jonathan picked at the thoughts that made it.

“Billy Hargrove?” Jonathan asked, tilting his head as he regarded him. He didn’t try to imagine it, it just sort of happened, Billy’s hand forming at Steve’s throat where he’d left his mark.

He wouldn’t have pegged Billy for the type, but then again he wouldn’t have pegged Steve, either. He couldn’t form the idea of what sort of person he would see and just _know_. Jonathan thought of his own reflection and still felt at a loss. Maybe you had to know yourself before you could see it on anyone else.

Steve nodded.

“That seems like a terrible idea,” Jonathan carried on. Steve didn’t argue and it brought up frustration to the surface of Jonathan’s mind. “You do remember what he did to your face, right?”

Saying it out loud, Jonathan realized it was concern he was feeling. He didn’t want Steve hurt. Not just Steve on Nancy’s behalf. He was frustrated because he was being reckless with himself, knowingly reckless with himself.

“Do you remember what _you_ did to my face?” Steve said. It was tossed out like a rebuttal, someone tired of being backed into the same corner.

Jonathan let out a sharp and bitter laugh. “Oh yeah! And why was that again? Right, right, right - because you’d painted ‘Nancy’s a Slut’ on the movie theatre marquis, because you thought – oh, wait for it – she cheated on you.”

Steve went very red and ducked his head.

“Well.”

This came from Nancy, her arms folded over her chest, the toe of her shoe dragging out a pattern in the dust on the floor. Both boys looked at her but she didn’t look at them. “Actually you punched him because he was shit-talking your family,” she noted before she looked up. “I’m just keeping us honest, if we’re picking stitches.”

“Alright, sure. But the irony still stands. Not to mention _Billy’s_ motivation was that you were _stopping_ him from beating up the kids – the ones you still hang out with. He's a violent maniac. You want to explain that to me?” Jonathan carried on.

Steve shrugged, wide and lost. “Why does it matter?” He had no explanation.

_“Why does it matter?”_ Jonathan repeated incredulously.

Jonathan’s father had been his first teacher in handling someone gently through a mistake, which meant the urge to drop Steve only deepened. Jonathan shook his head, that restless itch in his palms making him clench his fists. “I guess it doesn’t. If you’re not going to care about it, why should I? Do what you want, Steve. You’re being an idiot, but okay.”

“Jonathan,” Nancy admonished, though softly, an understanding sort of sigh.

“Well he is!” Jonathan said, finally able to throw his hands up in the air, though he still wasn’t backing away.

Steve smiled tightly, more wince than grin. “I’m sorry.”

Jonathan shook his head, wishing that caring about people could save them from themselves, and that it could stop being a shock when that didn’t work out. “Billy Hargrove,” he answered instead of saying that it was okay. Because it wasn’t.

“So, where does that leave us where you’re concerned?” Nancy cut in, looking keenly at Jonathan. Bringing them back to the topic at hand more acutely. Would she always have to play mediator with them like this?

“The same place we were this morning,” Jonathan answered, not looking at Steve. “We’re a we, Steve’s an idiot, Billy is a first class douchebag. If you’re fine with it and he’s fine with it, who am I to tell you all what to do with yourselves.” His voice was sharp. The kind of tone that made ‘I don’t care’ sound like ‘I care too much to stand it’.

“Part of this,” Nancy said gently, kindly. Her voice taking the concern Jonathan had been balling up into anger this whole conversation and unfolding it for him. Steve nodded fervently, despite the fact Jonathan had just called him an idiot at least twice.

Jonathan had always liked photographs because words got difficult, tangled. He couldn’t always find the right ones at the right times, and even if he could he couldn’t always say them.

Jonathan reached out for both of them, and it took them a moment to realize what he was initiating before folding in against him. As they came tighter together, the air between them strangely humid in the damp of the shed, the tension dispersed like a hum of electricity finally being silenced. A thing you didn’t know you were feeling until it was over.

At first he thought it was more for them than for him, but putting hands on them, feeling them real and breathing, suddenly felt necessary for this to make sense. “I’m sorry,” Jonathan told Steve’s neck, because he was far too tall, as always. Nancy’s hair was damp against his cheek.

“It’s okay,” Steve answered, because he could forgive just about anything.

“Yeah, I guess it is,” Jonathan said, trying to take his cue from them, because he wasn’t yet used to keeping things. Nancy squeezed his hip idly, quiet praise, silent thanks.

\--

Later that night, Jonathan lay on his bed contemplating David Bowie and bisexuality. Which is to say his own bisexuality, and not David Bowie’s, because unlike David Bowie, his was rather ambiguous. If it really was at all. Though he could objectively say that David Bowie was attractive, and that Steve was attractive - he was not pulled to him like he was to Nancy.

He wasn’t repulsed by the notion, and being repulsed was treated like it was a prerequisite to manhood that he’d missed out on. Even if Jonathan wasn’t sure of his sexuality, everyone from his father to school yard bullies had told him he was gay. Which of course was meant to be an insult, not an attempt to help him find clarity.

But honestly, he really wasn’t pulled to anyone like he was to Nancy. People were a series of lines and shapes that came together to make good photographs, but aesthetics and attraction weren’t something he seemed to be able to put in sharp focus for himself.

Jonathan had thought he was figuring it out with Steve. But Steve had apparently figured himself out all over the back of a Camaro, so Jonathan was left to fumble through on his own.

A tapping, soft and almost lost in the easy drum beat of Changes, pulled him from his thoughts. He looked to his window and saw Steve, there in the darkness, on the other side of the glass. He waved at him when he noticed his attention.

It took him a moment to realize that the Steve outside his window was not just a projection of his current train of thought. It was a slightly less impressive feat, being that Jonathan was on the ground floor as opposed to the garage scaling act he had to perform to visit Nancy, but it was startling none the less because Steve had never done it before.

‘Open the window,’ he mouthed from the other side, or whispered in a way that got lost against the glass. Jonathan gave him a look that said ‘Obviously,’ without moving his mouth at all.

It was a bit of a nuisance, what with his desk being pushed up beneath the window; a great many things had to be rearranged to let him in. The cold air came in with Steve, who kept his feet on the sill, mud caking his shoes from cutting through the garden. The rain had stopped and the night smelled damp and waking. He twisted to look at Jonathan, sat on the edge of his desk. “Hey,” he said quietly but casually, like this wasn’t out of the ordinary.

“Hi,” Jonathan said but it sounded more like, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

“Listening to Bowie – that’s good, that’s cool. I feel like that’s the soundtrack for your room,” Steve said, like that’s exactly why he’d come to Jonathan’s window. Steve carried on, gesturing towards Jonathan and his bedroom door, to the Byers family as a whole. “Sorry about this, I would have called but it’s late and I know you guys hate a late-night phone call.”

“And then I forgot about how rain makes mud…” Steve looked at his shoes, still on the ledge, with some annoyance.

Jonathan stared at him. This wasn’t a thing that they did. Was this a thing he wanted to start doing? “Why are you here?” Steve smiled at him and Jonathan found himself aware that he was nervous. What was Steve nervous for? That made Jonathan nervous. He folded his arms around himself because the air was cold and he didn’t know what was coming.

“Do you like me?” Steve asked, his head cocking a little bit, his teeth catching his lower lip. “Like, _like_ -like me.”

“Uhm,” Jonathan responded, taking a step back. He felt like he’d somehow been broadcasting his thoughts out into the universe when it was meant to be a private line of inquiry with himself. He felt overheard and under prepared.

Steve closed one eye and wrinkled his nose. The expression was strangely endearing and self-deprecating. He carried on like he didn’t hear a ‘No’ in Jonathan’s silence. Which was good, because that’s not necessarily what Jonathan’s silence had to say.

“Because I like you.”

_Oh,_  said Jonathan’s silence, and Jonathan said nothing.

“And I thought maybe you didn’t know that, and that you thought that maybe I just agreed to this,” he gestured between them, “to be with Nancy - because you haven’t tried to kiss me since the woods - and that was awkward and stupid, but I’d like to do it again where it’s not… if you wanted. And things happened with Billy, and I just didn’t want you to think that I’d replaced you,” Steve explained very quickly, his thoughts falling out of him like he’d crammed them hurriedly into his mind and bumped into Jonathan in the hallway of a romantic comedy.

And Jonathan’s silence had nothing to offer, his expression guarded.

“Unless you just agreed to this for Nancy,” Steve said, his tone like a joke but his face like he’d been hit.

Jonathan thought on that a moment more. He wasn’t being quiet to be cruel, he just hadn’t been ready to have this conversation out loud with anyone but himself. He respected Steve too much to lie, and he liked him too much give him the truth as it stood, because ‘I don’t know if I like you’ can sound a lot like ‘I don’t like you’, and Jonathan hated saying he didn’t know something, anyways.

So he’d give him what he did know, the piece he did have:

“If it had to be anyone, of course it would be you.”

**Nancy**

The heart wants what the heart wants. People liked to say that to justify poorly thought out matches, but Nancy knew it was bigger than that. It wasn’t just a statement of who - it was where, and when, and why, and _who else_ , and no one got to pick the answers. If wanting were a choice, then there were much easier choices than loving two boys at once in Hawkins, Indiana.

Though she doubted what was happening between Steve and Billy was a matter of heart, wanting remained an involuntary action.

So she wasn’t mad at Steve… not deeply, anyways. She was mad in the superficial way that betrayals always make a person mad, but not in the bone deep, skin burning way some people might be. His timing was the worst part of it, but she knew he still loved her and he still loved Jonathan, and that he lacked any sort of danger sense, and that this was an unfortunate side effect of that.

But she was mad at Billy.

Oh boy, was she ever.

She was mad like it was a solid thing she had swallowed, an iron ball of fire pressed beneath her lungs. Carrying it around was getting heavy, and she needed to put it somewhere. How dare he ask anything of Steve after what he’d done to him.

They didn’t share the same classes and she’d never actually spoken to him. They didn’t exactly run in the same circles, but she knew where he hung out, the company he kept. It wasn’t exactly a huge school, and Billy was just the sort of person that people always seemed to know where he was.

In this case it was detention with Mrs. Russo, because he’d either set fire to something in the science lab, told her she was a fascist bitch, or neglected to hand in his homework for the fifth consecutive time – depending on who you asked.

Nancy doubted he knew the word fascist.

Billy stepped out into the empty hall with no books weighing him down and a hand absently tousling his hair, before he dug into his coat pockets for his cigarettes. He paused in the junction of the hallways to look for the lighter to match.

The school had been decorated with a plethora of paper cherubs and pink and red hearts in preparation for Valentine’s day and he looked misplaced against all of the sweet decorations, a fire hazard amongst paper doilies. Nancy couldn’t help but notice that her nails were digging crescent moons into her palms. She’d never wanted to punch anyone so badly.

“Hey,” she called, so he wouldn’t leave, closing the gap between them. It wasn’t exactly a friendly ‘hey’.

Billy looked up, curious, his cigarette not yet lit. He didn’t take it from his mouth but waited for her to get closer before he said, “Nancy, right? I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.” There was a laugh behind his words, or perhaps that was just a side effect of the closed-lip speech that happened when you spoke around a cigarette

Nancy pretended she didn’t notice that she sort of got it. Aesthetically, anyways.

“Save the bullshit,” she answered, pulling right from that little iron ball of rage beneath her lungs. “We need to talk.”

Billy chuckled and turned towards her properly, taking the cigarette from his lips. “You seem upset. Did I have the pleasure and forget? I’m real sorry, Nance, I’ll call you in the morning next time.”

“Hilarious. We need to talk about Steve,” she said, keeping her arms at her sides because if she lifted them to cross over her chest, she couldn’t trust herself to fold them neatly and not take a detour to Billy’s jaw along the way.

“King Steve,” he sing-songed it out, his lips curving up at the corners. “What about him?”

“You’re going to mind the bruises when you’re with him, or we’re going to have a problem.”

Something crossed over Billy’s face. Maybe if she wasn’t so angry it would have scared her, the way his expression didn’t shift but the charm vanished like a light flicking off, and left only something sharp and hungry in the dark. He looked away from her to put the cigarette between his lips again and lit it this time, taking in a lungful of smoke.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he spoke, smoke curling out of his mouth as he did. “And I don’t appreciate your tone.”

Nancy rolled her eyes, because it was absolutely absurd, this boy from California who didn’t know how to dress for February, trying to intimidate her when she’d fought real monsters. Her index finger twitched idly at her side.

“Oh I’m so sorry,” Nancy spoke, a hand over her heart as she put on an affectation of sweet innocence, her tone light and friendly, her ponytail bouncing as she spoke. “You’re going to mind your fucking manners when you’re fucking my boyfriend, or I’m going to ruin your fucking life, Hargrove.”

She batted her eyelashes at him for good measure before she dropped her voice back to its usual pitch. “How’s my tone?”

The line of his jaw tightened, his nostrils flared, the tendons of his hand stood out as he clenched his fists. Nancy was smugly pleased, that little iron fire ball glowed at having company.

“Don’t tell me what to do, Wheeler,” his voice cool and even.

“I’m not telling you what to do, I’m telling you what will happen if you keep it up,” she bit back, all heat in contrast.

“What are you going to do? Huh? All 20 pounds of you?” Billy demanded, taking a step towards her. She didn’t move, but she tilted her head to maintain eye contact.

“I will tell everyone exactly where he’s getting his marks from,” Nancy answered.

He took a slow drag off his cigarette. The darkness shifted behind his eyes, sharper and hungrier. Nancy pretended not to notice that he was actually dangerous. The ember on his cigarette glowed bright.

“You’re bluffing.”

“Try me.”

“You’d be dragging Steve down with me.”

“He has four more months before he graduates. You have that and another year. He has a loving girlfriend and a string of girls from before me who can all attest to his bedroom preference. You took out Sharon and she told me that even though she was climbing into your lap you were nothing but talk. Doesn’t look good, Billy.”

Billy stared at her for a moment, and perhaps he was wondering where he’d hide her body. She relished his discomfort, because frankly it was discomforting to know that despite the fact he’d done his unmitigated best to reshape Steve’s face with his fists, Steve still wanted to get into a car with him. He still let him touch him.

What did that say about her? About Jonathan? Were any of them doing anything but hurting Steve and dragging him back up to his feet to do it again?

It made her skin crawl, and the fire sputtered under the weight of self doubt.

“Or - you control yourself and continue walking around here like your dick is magic, or whatever it is you walk around here like,” she carried on, finally taking a step back from him. His smokes were cheap, and the air between them was stifling with the smell of them.

Billy narrowed his eyes at her, mistrusting. “And you’ll just keep your mouth shut, just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“That makes no fucking sense. You wouldn’t just let it go like that,” he paused, his gaze searching her face for something that made sense to him. “You get off on this?” his voice lowered to a breath.

She felt her cheeks burn, but she wasn’t interested in giving him the satisfaction of breaking eye contact.

“You don’t know anything about me!” Nancy snapped, and Billy grabbed her arm, pulling her further down the hall. He glanced over his shoulder to be sure that nobody overheard them, but nobody was there. With his grip on her arm, a logical part of her saw how this was stupid. Nancy yanked her arm back from him, adjusting her backpack on her shoulders.

“Tell me why,” Billy demanded.

“I don’t have to explain anything to you,” Nancy sneered. “If you cared about him at all, you wouldn’t have to ask.”

She turned to leave but he blocked her way. Not fully, just moving with her, the promise of a collision, the way a dog lurches for a ball that hasn’t been thrown. Nancy moved the other direction and he blocked her there, too. She glared up at him and he grinned before taking the final drag off his cigarette.

“That’s funny, Wheeler,” Billy hummed and flicked the still burning end of his cigarette at her.

She jolted a little to brush it away from her, but returned to his smug gaze, ignoring the smoldering cigarette butt that skittered across the tile.

“Say hi to your mom for me,” he said, brushing past her. What the hell was that supposed to mean?

“You don’t scare me!” Nancy lied, but anger felt a lot like bravery and she’d seen worse than Billy Hargrove, and he would see worse if he pushed her. Steve could forgive pretty much anything, but Nancy didn’t consider herself so blessed.


	3. March 1985

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nancy and Jonathan talk about the whole "Billy's dating our boyfriend" situation, Steve also wants to discuss that, or maybe just friendship? Billy wants the record to show he is absolutely NOT dating Steve.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoy this chapter! Billy is made of internalized homophobia and confuses flirting with attempted manslaughter, but otherwise is on pretty good behaviour.

**Nancy**

“So,” Jonathan began with an air of great seriousness. This didn’t alarm Nancy much, he generally had an air of great seriousness around him. “Billy Hargrove,” he finished like the name was an entire thought of its own. Really, it was.

Nancy immediately felt herself tense up, her mouth dipping into a frown. The two of them had gotten together to go for a walk, they’d wandered themselves into the woods despite the way the carpet of leaves slipped beneath them, soaked from a late winter snow fall that had then been rescinded by warmer temperatures. He’d put his hand in hers to keep her from slipping, she kept it there just to hold it and also because the path really was trying its best to get them both down in the mud. Strangely she never considered forgoing the walk or moving it to more stable ground.

She nodded grimly. “Are you really okay with it?” Nancy asked after a moment of contemplation on the topic of Billy.

“He’s a big boy,” Jonathan answered in a sort of non-answer. Neither of them were really okay with Billy but Steve hadn’t come home with a neck or wrists covered in bruises since before Valentine’s day. He would still have bruises, just in less obvious places. Billy was keeping up his end of the bargain, it just felt strange to bargain with someone so reckless over someone so important.

Nancy looked at Jonathan closely. He was keeping his eyes on the ground to minimize the chances of falling, but his concentration extended inwards as well, he was thinking it over far more carefully than his cavalier response gave away.  

“Good talk,” Nancy teased, squeezing his hand a little. Jonathan chuckled with her, smiling.

“He’s complicated,” he said finally.

Nancy snorted. “Billy is not complicated, he’s a run of the mill jerk, they’re a dime a dozen out here.”

“Steve. Steve is complicated,” Jonathan corrected. He opened his mouth to carry on along the thought but he closed it again with a frown. His hand tightened on Nancy’s though he hadn’t slipped.

“He didn’t take up with Billy because you’re not ready,” Nancy said softly. She couldn’t be certain that that was what he was thinking, Jonathan’s thoughts were harder to parse than most people’s, but he wasn’t impossible to read like he thought he was.

The corner of his mouth tugged slightly, not frowning or smiling, just an acknowledgement of the statement. A desire to argue that he didn’t follow through on because it would involve talking more on the subject. “I wouldn’t blame him if he did,” he said finally. “I’m not a sure bet.

“Who is?” Nancy asked, shrugging her shoulders, swinging their clasped hands between them a little.

“Besides, in your scenario, we’re both at fault because I’m not rocking his world hard enough,” Nancy pointed out, which was a manipulation of sorts. Jonathan would never say anything against her but was very inclined to wrap the universe up around his neck like a noose.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” he sighed.

“I know what you’re saying, I’m just saying I think it’s bullshit,” she said. “Because I know I’m rocking his world, so if it were just about getting _some,_ he has plenty.” She carried on. “He is waiting on you, he is just also cursed by Hargrove’s dick magic, we have to hold out hope it will pass.”

Jonathan made a disgusted face that made Nancy laugh, though it was cut short when she slipped on a thick clump of leaves exposing a deep gouge of sodden earth. She caught herself from falling with Jonathan’s help. He pulled her closer, and she bumped her shoulder affectionately to his in thanks. “Dick magic,” he scoffed, appalled, and she laughed again.

“I don’t think we pick who we love or want,” Nancy said more seriously. “It’s all just chemical.”

Jonathan was quiet and pensive on this point and Nancy got the sense she’d prodded at a spot that Jonathan wasn’t keen to talk about.

“That’s what’s complicated,” he said finally as they came to a place in the woods where someone in the course of history had either began or succeeded in building some sort of structure. Some combination of time and circumstances left it as the idea of a building represented in low ragged walls which made for excellent places to lean or sit or make out on. Traveller’s choice.

Nancy planted her palms on the rough surface and hefted herself up. Jonathan leaned on the wall alongside her. “I think it’s all gonna work out,” Nancy confessed, petting through Jonathan’s hair with chilled fingers.

“Pfft, optimist,” he replied, leaning into her touch.

“Bite your tongue.” She laughed, leaning to kiss the top of his head. “I’m a stone cold realist.”

He tilted his head back to kiss her and she could taste his toothpaste; knowing he’d brushed his teeth before he left made her smile into the kiss, her fingers took a delicate hold on his jaw, her thumb traced the sharp line of cheek bone. “See? Chemical. Couldn’t fall out of love with you if I tried,” she teased softly.

“I guess I know what you mean,” Jonathan answered with a smile. Nancy liked his smiles, they had a rare quality to them, not from being infrequent but the way they seemed far removed from his resting face. He had a host of them, sardonic and sarcastic and softly pleased but none of them stayed around for an indefinite amount of time. She etched each one into her memory, or in this case leaned in to taste them.

“You know you’re allowed to have an opinion about Steve and Billy,” she said, and his smile eased off again, back to seriousness. He considered her words and shrugged.

“I don’t like it.”

Good! They were getting somewhere now.

“But you’re okay with it?” she coaxed, and he shrugged again, but followed it up with nothing and she briefly considered tightening her arm around his neck. Most of the time he was very upfront with his opinions, but it seemed that when things pertained to relationships it was like pulling teeth out of him. “I’m not going to ask him to stop on a shrug, Jonathan.”

Jonathan looked a little confused by that sentiment, surprised to find he had some sort of definitive vote in this. That three really meant three. They were all new to this but she knew that if they didn’t keep talking to each other, checking in, they’d fall apart, and she’d rather have a thousand awkward conversations than lose them.

“I’m not – no, you don’t have to ask him to stop, they’ve followed the rules, Steve seems…” Jonathan paused for the right word. “Present still. Don’t you think? Do you want him to stop?”

“No, I feel the same. I sort of wish he’d picked anyone else but… it’s different? And I’m not threatened by Billy, so it works out,” Nancy said, letting the backs of her heels hit off the low wall.

They were quiet for a while, the forest around them making early spring noises, birds, and crackling sticks, and the moaning of wind. Jonathan made a soft, amused noise and Nancy looked at him with her eyebrows arched curiously.

“Our lives are weird,” he said.

“Just a little bit.”

**Jonathan**

Jonathan was forgiving Steve, but it wasn’t a passive thing that happened. It was an action he had to take, like chewing. It was something that could be done mindlessly but needed to be started consciously. It ached his jaw from clenching down, but he was doing it. And so when Steve called him up early on a Saturday to ask him out into the woods with his camera to revisit the thicket they’d sealed their intentions in, Jonathan agreed.

Steve had this idea to take pictures of that spot in the woods during the various seasons, to frame them for Nancy. Jonathan was often surprised by Steve’s thoughtfulness, he could seem superficial, guided by instinct and sheer luck most of the time. Which may have been occasionally true, but the fact he also cared about Nancy as deeply as Jonathan could want for her was also true. Not just physically but in those careful considerations. He chewed away at forgiveness, because Steve was thoughtful.

Steve picked him up at his place, despite the fact that Jonathan was pretty sure they could have walked. Spring had touched Hawkins. The air was clearing up into something that, though not hot, was a relief from winter’s hold. Steve stepped in while Jonathan pushed on his shoes and pulled on his jacket.

Will bounded out to him full of the sort of life the was only coaxed to the surface by trusted friends. They exchanged some sort of secret handshake and his brother started explaining the intimate details of the newest story arc of Will the Wise from their latest D&D session.

Jonathan was protective of Will, and he watched Steve for a sign of his eyes glazing over, but Steve was enthusiastically invested, he asked questions, and Jonathan’s hackles eased down. His mother came into their midst and raised her eyebrows at Jonathan as though to say ‘keep this one’ before she put her hands on top of Will’s head like a playful brain sucker, ruffling his hair in the process.

“Hi Steve, what are you boys up to today?”

“Wandering the wilderness for adventure,” Steve answered.

His mother looked a little strained around her eyes at the idea of letting any of her children out of the house and into the woods. Jonathan was well aware that she would worry forever. He still felt a spike of anxiety when it came time for Will to come home from any of his gallivanting, he didn’t even have to come home late for it to happen. As the time counted down, a tension grew inside of him at the possibility that he would not make it back on time – that the hours could tick away and he’d never make it home…

It seemed like penance for missing the exact time he failed to get in the last time, and Will wasn’t even his son. He had a lot of respect for his mother’s restraint in letting them carry on as normal in the wake of such abnormal things.

“Well, be back before dark,” she said, tugging Will back against her subconsciously. She looked down into his face and smiled, reminded that he was still there in her hands.

“I’ll have him back before curfew, no worries about that Ms. Byers,” Steve answered. “See you around, Will.”

Jonathan snorted a little at the way Steve maintained himself in front of parents like he was on a personal campaign for most-likable. “I’ll be home way before dark,” Jonathan assured, closing the door behind them.

They entered the woods in the same place they’d all met up in early January. The air was warmer, yet somehow they were still dressed similarly. Steve in one of his trademark jackets and sunglasses and Jonathan’s winter wear doubled as early spring wear and late fall wear. Truly his wardrobe’s only dramatic transformation being the exposure of his forearms with the addition of t-shirts.

His camera hung over his shoulder by the strap as they made their way on to the path. Things looked different than they had, new buds gave everything that bright green look of new life. Not quite yet leaves but they smelled of new growth, and with pale sunlight streaming through the branches it didn’t look like the kind of place anything bad could happen. Of course, that was all familiar places.

“Thanks for helping me out with this,” Steve said to break the silence Jonathan hadn’t noticed forming. He was inclined towards silence, but Steve liked to talk, and he probably should have noticed his lack of words.

“It’s a good idea,” Jonathan answered with a shrug.

Steve laughed a little. “I have them from time to time,” he teased, and Jonathan smiled a little.

He was funny. And good with his family. They were friends, Jonathan noticed. He’d lost sight of that a bit in the early budding of this relationship, the new green of something else overshadowing the foundation beneath.

To be fair, Jonathan hadn’t really trusted that foundation to still be there after he’d hooked up with Nancy, that was the sort of thing most people didn’t recover from. But they weren’t most people. Especially not Steve, who seemed to manage forgiveness like it was his first language, English a close second but not quite as effortless.

“When do you think the last time you and I hung out solo was?” Steve asked with his disturbing habit of plucking thoughts from Jonathan’s head when he was engrossed in a conversation with himself.

Jonathan hummed, considering, throwing his memory back. “Probably before you and Nancy got together the first time,” he stated.

Steve considered this with a frown. “I think you’re right. Is this, like, really weird right now?”

“As opposed to all the very normal things I do with my time?” Jonathan asked, arching an eyebrow, and it was Steve’s turn to laugh. “It’s fine, Steve.”

“It just sort of sucks we never got to spend a lot of time together,” Steve said, jumping up to hit at a branch that sagged into the trail and was rewarded with a small shower of dew that had collected on the buds. The droplets slipped down the collar of his shirt and clung to his hair, and he shook them away without looking undignified. “I like you, y’know,” he said with a dramatic inflection and Jonathan felt himself flush.

Steve forgave easy and he loved easy and Jonathan had to wonder if he’d spend his whole life having to work at Steve. It seemed wholly unfair to someone so wide open.

Because it felt vulnerable and difficult, Jonathan retreated into sarcasm. “I didn’t know, maybe you should climb in my window at midnight to tell me.”

Steve laughed. “It was like 8:30 at _best_ , don’t be so dramatic.”

“Nearly ten,” Jonathan responded, mostly tending to his camera as they got closer, checking the settings and removing the lens cap.

“Timing aside,” Steve said with that careful air of feeling him out. If he hadn’t been so busy with the lens cap, Jonathan would have noticed Steve take off his sunglasses. When he looked back his was folding the arms in a nervous fidget. “The visit was alright?”

It was so very round about and carefully neutral. Jonathan almost wanted to laugh at the irony of all of this, that they had all goaded death, faced interdimensional entities, planted their feet and fought back against things that posed a real and horrifying threat in ways they barely understood – and yet here they were, nervously mincing words about typical teenage drama. Who likes who? Are we friends? Can we be more? The mundane things still snared them up just like everybody else.

He would have laughed except a sharp static tingled behind his ribs twisted him up inside. He was just as nervous about the answer as Steve was, just as anxious to know the details and finally have something tangible. It all felt so pedestrian to be young and confused and caught up in the microcosm of relationships. A thousand songs had been written about it. Still Jonathan managed to feel singular in his frustration at being unable to figure it out.

“Yeah,” he said, looking through the lens and adjusting the settings again – they had been fine, but he needed something to do with his hands. He tried to find something else to say. Maybe that he was thinking a lot about it, and that he’d noticed Steve had really beautiful hands, and that he knew for certain that they were friends even if he hadn’t quite made it to fine in regards to Billy. He could say that it would take a while, because it hurt Nancy and he was stubborn about that sort of thing, but he was working at it, chewing away at forgiveness.

Maybe any of that, but time dripped by him and he said nothing. He just adjusted and re-adjusted his camera settings until the quiet had become heavy and weird. The weight of the silence too much to lift.

But when he glanced at Steve, he wasn’t waiting and growing distressed in Jonathan’s quiet like he expected. He’d found a log that spanned the ditch that ran along the one side of the path, collecting all manner of murk in its fold. He was crossing it one foot in front of the other with his arms stretched out for balance. Once he got to the other side, he turned around and came back to Jonathan, hopping down with a smile.

“Cool,” he chirped. Jonathan could tell he ached to ask more, to know the answer as badly as Jonathan wanted to give it to him. But he was willing to leave it there and Jonathan was quietly grateful.

“You’re one of the good ones,” Jonathan informed him, snapping a picture of Steve, unposed and unprepared. He wasn’t sure if he liked Steve like he’d want him to, but he could see why someone would. Why Nancy did. And that eventually, he would forgive him.

**Billy**

If he was honest, Billy thought they would have broken up by then. Not that it mattered at all that Steve signed his balls over to Nancy Wheeler and went about the school like she’d somehow invented electric lights, guitar solos and blow jobs in no particular order. It wasn’t Billy’s business what Steve did, as long as he was still willing to go for a drive when the mood struck. Which was often – blame those teenage hormones.

It was just weird that she was okay with the things they did when they could find the time and privacy. He’d left sucking bruises beneath his collarbone that the boys in the locker room assumed were Nancy’s handiwork. Billy was giving her quite the reputation, but she hadn’t spoken to him since her Valentine’s threat…

She had to get off on it. He couldn’t fathom any other explanation.

Billy sat in his car, watching the two of them make their way to Steve’s car through the rear-view mirror. Steve had slung his arm over her shoulders, making wide gestures with the other arm, and they laughed together.

Couples in general were a whole other animal to Billy, the intricacies of romance were beyond him, and not just because his particular brand would get him murdered by his father. No, it was more the idea of putting that sort of power in someone’s hands, letting them walk around freely, was just an inconceivable notion. He did, however, know that most people would tear their own skin off with jealousy before they let someone else touch that chosen person – at least, Billy certainly would. He’d want to break someone’s bones over it.

But Nancy and Steve laughed, and held hands, and kissed in hallways, and generally seemed to be solid. Like the marks he left on his chest didn’t exist at all.

Fucking. Weird.

The weirder part was having someone out there not honourbound by the act itself to keep quiet. It made him jumpy, if not cautious. Steve was one thing, but Nancy had no reason not to be vindictive about it. And yet… here they were, still living their lives.

Lost in his thoughts, it seemed that all of a sudden Steve appeared to his left. He leaned in against the driver’s side window, his elbows heavy on the sill, which meant he had to bend nearly in half to do it. Billy would have made some snide comment about how Steve couldn’t help but bend over around him but the parking lot was still crowded with people lingering about, not quite back in the routine of school after spring break.

Glancing at the rear-view mirror again, he saw Nancy was talking to the quiet kid from his English class. Billy had seen them all hanging out quite a bit. Classic third wheel syndrome. Eventually he graced Steve with his attention; his eyes behind sunglasses, he illustrated this by lolling his head fully towards him while rested against the headrest.

“Can I help you, Harrington?”

“What? I can’t say hi?”

“Looks like you can, and have. We’re all very impressed,” Billy replied, his mouth curving into a smile to show he didn’t really mean any harm. Not in this moment, anyway. Steve and Nancy may have been beyond comprehension but the arrangement benefited him. For now.

Steve laughed and shook his head. “You ever get tired of being a dick?”

“I’ve got the stamina for the long haul, amigo. Did you want something?”

Steve folded his arms against the roof of the car, ducking his head and shading them both in a false sense of privacy. “I was thinking that you could come by my place tonight.”

Billy cocked his head. Ever since he’d first coaxed Steve into his backseat, it had been exclusively Billy making the first move. He decided the whens and the wheres, and Steve obliged. It was in his nature to be obliging. This shift in the dynamic since Nancy found out about them did not sit well. It felt a little like pebbles sliding out before a landslide.

“For what?” Billy asked flatly.

“What do you mean, for what? We could watch a movie or something, my parents will be home late but you could stay over if you wanted,” Steve offered with a shrug of his shoulders. His fingers drummed on the roof of the Camaro. The boy could not stay still for the life of him. “I’ll make popcorn, you can pick the movie, what do you say?”

Billy squinted behind his sunglasses, his mouth turning down into a grimace at the notion. Though spending the late hours of the night pinning him into a legitimate mattress had its appeals, the last thing Billy needed was his car parked in Steve Harrington’s driveway. The fact he was leaning against his car now was enough of a disaster.

There was a world of difference between the two of them, only a small and inflammatory intersection where they met. People could make rumours out of far less. Steve’s proximity always felt charged and dangerous, Billy knew himself well enough to understand his impulse control was lacking.

“I will take you for a drive later if you stop talking about this,” Billy answered, turning the key in the engine of his car, feeling it growl to life around him.

Steve laughed, a sound that was more of a sigh, but he nodded. “Alright, that works too.”

“Great,” Billy said, rolling up the window to signal the conversation was finished.

Steve reclaimed his arms from the rising window with a roll of his eyes and began his retreat. Billy watched Steve until he was in the center of his rear view mirror, and with the car in reverse, tapped the gas so that he backed up enough to startle him. Steve lifted his arms in the universal signal for ‘What the actual fuck,’ and Billy chuckled to himself.

He wasn’t sure his grin was visible to Steve when he craned his neck around, but he assumed so because the Prom King flipped him off with both hands as he backed out of his way and back to Nancy.

Hopefully that would be enough to knock sleepovers out of his head.

**Steve**

“You know, you could still come,” Steve said casually, his attention seeming to mostly be on a leaf he was twirling. The sky was folding itself up, calling between the trees that it was time to go home, but still they sat on the hood of Billy’s car. It was unseasonably warm for March and their blood was running hot, but the chill was creeping up on them.

“Like right on the spot? You gotta warm a guy up first,” Billy drawled.

Steve laughed, tossing his leaf at Billy, it didn’t make it past the midline, falling between them like it had hit an invisible barrier. Steve watched it make its twisting way back down onto the hood of the car before he carried on. “No, I mean you could still come over.”

Billy started collecting himself for a hasty retreat. Steve had sort of expected that, Billy was easily spooked by anything more emotionally weighted than a blow job. He just didn’t really understand why being in his house counted as threatening.

“Why do you want your parents to hear you choke on my cock so bad?”

Steve rolled his eyes and snorted out another laugh, not moving from the hood of the car. “Why are you so weird about coming to my house?”

He tried to make it sound light, because really it was, he just wanted him to come because he liked having him around. Which was strange to say, but his caustic wit and abrasive charisma had grown on him.

In some small way, he knew himself well enough to know he’d grown to like him more than a casual presence and a hook up, but he was well practiced at the art of a casual fling. It had sort of been his entire MO before Nancy. He grew affectionate quickly, but he didn’t mind feeling affectionate towards friends or friends with benefits. Steve wouldn’t stamp the “L” word on his feelings for Billy, but there was a lot about him that was surprising and he liked that.  

“Get off, let’s go,” Billy said instead of answering.

“Like right on the spot?” Steve threw back, and Billy stared at him in a way that said he would rather swallow drain cleaner than spend any more time with him. Steve found that hard to believe.

“It’s not that big of a deal,” Steve pointed out, amused.

“Then why do you have such a hard on about it?”

A shrug. “Because we’re friends.”

“You have shitty taste in friends, get in the car.”

Steve slipped down off of the hood and went to the passenger door. The sun had dipped beneath the horizon and left a blue ink sort of haze over them. Steve couldn’t see Billy’s expression clearly, though he could see the shape of him. The way his shoulders squared like he was readying for a fight. There was also a lot about Billy that was so tragically predictable.

“You can relax, I’m not going to force you to a family dinner or anything, it was just an offer,” Steve said once he was settled in his seat, tracing his fingertips along the curved upper edge of the window.

“Jesus Christ, Harrington, we have a good thing going here, don’t start getting clingy,” Billy growled, his voice clipped and irritated. Now in the closed space of the car, he was nothing but shadows and annoyance like a physical presence.

Steve’s eyebrows arched upwards, this was the place that surprising and predictable met. When he could be so ridiculously _Billy_ but somehow it still managed to baffle. Steve did a very good job of not laughing again, even though he sort of wanted to. It was still pretty funny.

The car got heavy with silence that was disturbed by Billy turning the key in the ignition, the snarling engine managing to somehow sound just as angry as the boy who owned it. The headlights glowed, illuminating the trees in front of them, and the refracting light showed Billy in softly touched edges, despite the hard line of his jaw. He turned to squint out the back window, to sort out how best to reverse them back towards the road.

A lot of people would argue that Billy and Steve didn’t have that much in common, but neither of them were particularly gifted at ignoring a glaring red button marked ‘Do not press’.

“So you think we have a good thing going?” Steve broke the silence, his voice tremored with a repressed laugh.

Keeping his head still, Billy’s eyes shifted from the back window to Steve with a slow sort of malevolence. Watching him out of the corner of his eye, like a dog would before it attacked. “Do you want to walk home?”

Steve let loose the laugh and Billy slugged him in the shoulder, hard enough that it would probably bruise and he was knocked against the car door, but it was entirely worth it. Billy returned to the task of backing them out onto the road, the car bumping along the uneven path until the tires hit pavement. “Oh come on, your eyes rolled fully back into your head earlier, I’m allowed to have fun,” Steve grinned, rubbing his shoulder.

“You’re a nightmare,” Billy said, but he sounded like he was fighting a laugh as well.

“But like a really sexy nightmare,” Steve teased. “Did I mention your eyes rolling all the way back? Now that was a sexy nightmare.”

Billy shook his head though his eyes stayed on the road. “I like you so much better when you aren’t talking.”

“Sucks to be you,” Steve answered and had to smack Billy’s hand away when he reached over for a blind grab into Steve’s hair, trying to tug his head down towards his lap.

The drive home was not very long with the way Billy drove.

Around the corner from Steve’s place, he pointed out his bedroom window, just visible through the trees from where they sat. Billy had adamantly refused to pull up front. “That’s my room, and the backyard opens up into the woods,” he explained, and despite his avid protest against coming over, Billy tilted his head to see what Steve was pointing out. “Y’know, in case any delinquents were interested in coming over but had some bizzaro hatred of front doors and general manners.”

“Very funny,” Billy replied flatly, but looked at the window a moment longer as though committing it to memory before he straightened himself out in his seat.

“Last chance,” Steve intoned, his hand still on the handle as he pushed the car door open.

“Get out of my car, you fucking weirdo!”


	4. April 1985

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter, Nancy, Steve and Jonathan spend some quality time together until Steve puts his entire foot in his mouth, Nancy gets a note shoved in her locker, and Billy doesn't get what he wants, for once.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Four chapters in! Follow [in-forgetting](https://in-forgetting.tumblr.com/) for updates and maybe notes and extra content in the future!

**Jonathan**

The house was empty, quiet, which was rare for the Byers’ house. Jonathan’s mom had taken Will somewhere and left the three teenagers holed up in Jonathan’s bedroom. He supposed it was Steve’s presence that made it all right, that allowed the door to be shut and the three of them to be unsupervised.

Which was funny, recent events considered, that the boy who climbed in through his bedroom window and looked at him like he was kept back only by Jonathan’s own hesitations made it alright. Steve, who would rest his hand on Nancy’s thigh in the car with a strange, intimate intensity, a constant air of naïve heat around him. Despite the fact he was the problem child of the trio, Steve was the sort of boy parents liked; a preppy, sweet boy who would take up a bat for the ones he loved – literally.

And then there was Nancy, with her steady aim and her fierce determination that made her throw everything she had into whatever venture she chose. She was smart and beautiful without trying, and modest in a way that put adults at ease and drove Jonathan quietly to distraction.

Steve and Nancy fit together in a way that was impossible not to notice, a prom king and queen sort of correctness that was inaccessible to Jonathan, but he found strangely captivating. He liked watching them touch, the heedless way they couldn’t keep their hands off each other whenever they had a moment to do so. Jonathan didn’t like to put that kind of vulnerability on display, but they couldn’t care less. It was embarrassing and cloying to be around in public, but in private it fascinated him.

The lights were off but eager spring pooled pale light in through the window, painting their skin like a charcoal drawing, all smudgy soft shadows and bright contrasting space. Nancy’s bra was pink and so were her cheeks and the brief glimpses of their tongues. Steve’s hand splayed on her waist, the spread of his fingers speaking to touching as much of her as he could reach.

Jonathan’s mind probably should have tilted to jealousy or lust or some other sin, but instead he reached for his camera. Watching them through the viewfinder, there was a strange shiver of heat, this view somehow more illicit than just gazing through his own eyes at them.

The click of the shutter drew their attention.

Both of them smiled and reinvested themselves into their little tangle, Nancy letting herself be pushed back against the mattress. Their eyes kept wandering back to him with coy smiles and playful posturing, for the camera and for him, and that shiver of heat made him restless, edge closer, into the tangle they made. To capture the places their skin touched, the places their mouths met, the way Nancy’s back would arch and Steve’s brow would furrow.

“Hold that,” he breathed. His words were soft but the record had stopped playing and the house was still. They were the only people in the world who existed at that moment.

And they listened, pausing where they touched like he’d frozen them with his voice as he could with his camera. They would touch for him and they would stop for him. There was a foreign notion of power in that, and he tried it out with the same over-eagerness that brought Nancy and Steve to touch in every spare moment they could manage.

Nancy and Steve were both panting, Jonathan's own breath warm and quick. He wondered absently why most people didn’t end up like them, in a group of three. This heat that permeated the room, making him light headed and their skin stick, only seemed possible with three. How would you get decent pictures with two?

Then of course, Jonathan always knew he didn’t think like most people.

Steve laughed as he nearly knocked his head against the camera when he sat up, Jonathan closer than he’d expected. “Are you going to get out from behind the camera, perv?”

His tone was light and teasing, but Jonathan’s face grew hot and he drew back like he’d spit it at him. There was Steve, who had sat on his window ledge and asked if he _‘like_ -liked’ him, who spread his fingers across Nancy’s ribs like he was trying to hold her in one hand, but then all at once he was Steve, who had humiliated him in the parking lot when Jonathan had pressed the boundaries of Nancy’s privacy.

“Sorry,” he muttered, moving off the bed to put the camera out of harm’s way on the desk. Protecting the lens from cracking against the floor in this aftershock of history. It suddenly seemed so lurid what he’d been doing, his ears burned.

“Nice going, Steve,” Nancy sighed, squirming out from beneath Steve, who looked like he wanted nothing more than to swallow his own tongue.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he floundered.

“He was only playing – we were all playing. He liked it, I liked it. You’re not a perv, Jonathan,” Nancy said, making her way over to him, her skin still bared and flushed. She touched his arm lightly and he couldn’t help but disagree. The thrill of how they moved and stopped for him still shivered up his spine, his skin thrummed, her touch burned, but he left his arm in her grasp.

“It’s okay, I have to develop them in the school dark room anyways, I probably shouldn’t be…” He trailed off his words, not sure how he wanted to finish that sentence.

“I’ll keep watch outside the door, you can take whatever pictures you want,” Steve offered, sitting up.

Jonathan smiled bleakly. He was dimly aware that Steve probably would have offered no matter what, but he was invested in this feeling of shame. “’Whatever I want’?” he laughed, shaking his head a little. “I’m not some kind of sex freak.”

“Of course you’re not,” Nancy interjected, teasing, “We’re the sex freaks.” She gestured between Steve and herself before draping her arms around Jonathan’s neck. “And this sex freak likes when you take pictures,” her gaze seemed to finish the statement with, ‘and I know you like it too.’

Jonathan sat with that a moment, not quite meeting her gaze before leaning in to kiss her. Her knowing him always felt less vulnerable than it did with other people, like he’d crack his ribs open for her if he could.

He could feel Steve’s gaze on them, and when he came up for air with Nancy’s fingers tangled in his hair, he was much closer than expected. It was like he’d been drawn forward by that same fascination, his gaze held that fixed and intimate intensity. Steve leaned towards them, this inherent desire to be included, despite the space that remained between them. There was an urge to bring his hand out and put it into Steve’s hair, to close that distance, reach from one time to another.

Jonathan’s fingers began to lift from Nancy’s hip, or at least consider the notion of it, when the sound of the front door brought them all back to _Now_ with a jolt. Nancy and Steve both went about gathering the clothing they had shed and straightening what had been dishevelled, while Jonathan busied himself putting on a new record.

Music began to fill the silence, the spell broken, the moment passed. When he turned back to them, they sat at the edge of the bed like nothing happened, but not quite looking at each other, laughter threatening to break out of all three of them.

He took another picture, the two of them with a foot of space between them, trying to look casual. Possibly it was to remind himself that he wasn’t some sex freak, but mostly it was just because he wanted to keep that moment-after. It put him a step further from the past, and a step closer to the next time they’d be holed up together in the unnatural quiet of an empty house.

**Steve**

“Do you do this with Jonathan?” Steve asked, the thought coming out of his mouth before it had even occurred to him that he’d thought it.

Nancy, half dressed in his lap, shifted back from where she’d been kissing his neck to look into his face. Her expression was a little perplexed as she tucked her dark hair behind both of her ears, as though making sure they weren’t obstructed and that she had heard what she thought she’d heard. “Why? Are we trying dirty talk now?” she asked with a note of amusement.

“No – I mean, maybe – but that’s not why I asked,” Steve answered, lowering his gaze a little. Somehow it was easier to talk about his insecurities with her collarbone. “I don’t think he likes me like...“ Steve gestured between them, a motion to the knot of hands and skin and mouths and half off clothes they had just been, “This. When it’s all three of us he hangs back, when it’s me and him, he… I don’t know, hangs back even further.”

“And you think _I’m_ the person to be talking to about this?” Nancy asked, her eyebrows arched.

Steve blinked at her. “I’ve tried talking to him. I can’t keep bothering him about it, do you know how that sounds?”

“Like you care what’s going on in his head?” Nancy supplied, amused by Steve’s huff of annoyance at that.

“No! It sounds like I’m trying to get into his pants, and I’m not here to rush him into anything, I just… want to know if we’re taking the scenic route or if the bridge is fully collapsed.”

Nancy leaned her head against her hand, her elbow on the back of the couch where they’d situated themselves. Steve’s parents wouldn’t be home for a while, which seemed to be the mantra of his existence, followed closely by: do they like me? Both were in play at that moment and he felt restless in the notion that he was somehow falling short for Jonathan.

“I don’t think anything has collapsed, Jon just takes a while to get on board with things, and doing things with you is always going to be different than doing things with me,” Nancy offered up.

Steve took on an air of offense even though he knew perfectly well she was right. She carried on with the same mild tone as though she didn’t notice.

“You’re a boy, and you were the competition, and then you weren’t, and while he was trying to figure that out, you fucked Billy freakin’ Hargrove - it’s a lot to process for anyone. And Jonathan takes time.”

Everything she said was true, but Steve didn’t want true. He didn’t even necessarily want to fool around with Jonathan - well he did, he absolutely did want to fool around with Jonathan - he just wanted to know that he liked him. It was hard for Steve to take it on faith. He’d spent so much time tearing apart every interaction he’d had with Nancy after they’d parted ways last October, the mindset still lingered.

“I just hate waiting for him to decide he doesn’t like me,” Steve murmured.

Nancy watched him, her legs still draped over his lap, and he dragged his hand along her thigh. She reached out and carded her fingers through his hair.

“We wouldn’t be here right now if he didn’t like you.”

“Yeah… _or_ he just likes you so much that he’ll allow just about anything,” Steve sighed, tipping his head back away from her touch to look up at the stucco above him. He was fully aware he was wallowing, but silently suffering was not nearly as satisfying as loudly suffering.

Nancy wasn’t having it though.

“Oh yeah, that’s Jonathan for you, blithely going ahead with things he doesn’t agree with. Real conformist. That’s what everyone says whenever you bring up Jonathan, no mind of his own,” she responded dryly, the sarcasm so thick it became a physical persona. She rolled her eyes, and her lips twisted into a look of incredulity. It was very hard to wallow properly when confronted with said face.

“I just want something to go on,” Steve mumbled, still looking at the stucco because it wasn’t making good points he couldn’t argue with.

“Which is why you have to talk to him again!” Nancy laughed, nudging at him until he looked at her properly. What did he do to deserve someone so reasonable? Probably something bad in a previous life.

He thought of Tommy and Carol and cans of spray paint. The sound of a camera lens shattering on the ground. How he’d looked too long at the freckles at the top of Tommy’s chest that would come with summer sun. Billy, and his hand wrapped around his throat a week before Valentine’s day. He supposed he deserved what he got in this life, past ones aside.

Eugh.

The sound was more of a thought at first, but then he expressed it. Suffering quietly was overrated.

“You have two options here; you talk to him, or you wait until he talks to you. But I will tell you from personal experience, you may be waiting a while,” Nancy said, taking his sound of disgust to mean he hated the idea of talking to Jonathan about this again. She wasn’t wrong.

“…How about you just tell me what he likes from personal experience,” Steve said, jumping back to the beginning of the conversation. Suffering at all was overrated when he had an empty house and Nancy half dressed in his lap. After all, half dressed was also half undressed.

Nancy’s lips twitched into a reluctant smile while she chuckled and shook her head. “Looking for tips?” she teased lightly, letting her fingers trace the line of his jaw. “Or are you just being dirty?”

“Can’t it be both?” Steve asked, leaning into the touch, kissing the tips of her fingers as she came back into his lap properly.

“You’re hard to keep up with,” Nancy noted with a fond chuckle, leaning in to kiss him, a lingering taste she smiled into.

“Mm, means I’m not boring,” Steve teased lightly.

Nancy made a considering noise, pretending to think it over, her eyes turned up to the ceiling like it was a hard fact to agree to.

“Hey!” Steve laughed, overturning her onto the couch and climbing on top of her, tickling her sides. Nancy shrieked and laughed, fighting back against the tickling onslaught with minimal success until she swapped tactics and reached up to grab Steve’s face to pull him into another kiss. This one clacked their teeth together but distracted them both all the same, still breathing heavy and giggling against each other’s lips.

Steve knew, drama and waiting aside, that things would be alright if there was still this. He liked her so much he’d allow just about anything.  

**Nancy**

Despite spending a lot of time feeling like a mediator, there were all these beautiful little moments that made up the rest of their relationship. They hadn’t really figured it all out yet, how to be in public, how to be alone together, how to be alone in pairs. No one provided instructions, but Nancy thought they were doing well with what they had to work with. Besides, if she minded being put in the middle, she wouldn’t have taken up with two boys.

There were all these little things, when they were together as three. The jokes that made all three of them nearly snort soda out of their noses, not having a hand to spare because both of hers were occupied by theirs, going to bed thinking about how beautifully impossible it was that they were making it work. This strange relief when they both looked up at her and she could comfortably think ‘I love them both,’ without that horrible addition of, ‘and I have to hurt one of them’.

It hadn’t occurred to her to try and hide it until it was already too late.

In class she treated Jonathan as she always had, her knee would rest against his, a private affection he allowed. From time to time she’d watch him engrossed in a book and wonder how anyone could ever look so severely serious. She ate her lunch on the hood of his car when he drove it to school, and sat with him at the edge of the parking lot when Steve had driven the three of them, since Steve was not so keen on anyone sitting on the hood of his car. Sometimes she put kisses against his shoulder or his cheek if she felt that they had no audience, not for anyone’s sake but Jonathan’s.

She treated Steve as she always had, he kissed her in the hallways, he lifted her up and took her hand when he could. But they didn’t share classes, and she hadn’t really noticed that she seemed to see them separately.

But apparently other people had.

There was a note shoved into the grating of her locker, folded tight. Nancy had to pry it out. It certainly wasn’t going to win any literary awards, but the big marker-written note in a feminine hand got the point across.

“Fan mail?” Jonathan was beside her without her noticing he’d come up. She didn’t bother to fold it away but tilted it towards him.

“You think people would come up with a different word, this one’s getting a little tired,” Nancy said in a casual and flippant voice, though she crushed the paper into a wad with more force than necessary, betraying the grip of tension that suddenly held her chest. Could they get in trouble for this?

“Are you alright?” Jonathan rested his hand on her elbow, a light touch, a reminder of his presence, not just physically.

“I just have more important things to think about than this, you know?” Nancy said, and her eyes were prickling with tears. Sometimes she cried when she was mad, but it felt like giving them – whoever they were - what they wanted. Instead, she squared her shoulders, and clenched her jaw, not allowing the tears to fall.

“Has anyone bothered you?” she asked, turning to Jonathan with a sudden thought.

Jonathan looked at her, his eyebrows lifted only slightly. “No, high school is utopia,” he responded flatly.

“I mean about this, more than usual,” Nancy clarified with an exasperated wave of her hand. Hawkins loved a rumour, loved the idea that Nancy the princess was stringing along two separate boys. Key word being separate. See, one version made Nancy a slut, the other made Jonathan and Steve queer. Some rumours were more dangerous than others.

Jonathan shook his head and she nodded vaguely. She wouldn’t have to start stitching red A’s to her tops just yet. “Alright… Do you want to skip? I can’t stand these people right now.”

There were also little things about them individually, about spending time alone with Jonathan or Steve, that made her feel lucky. Steve was exactly the kind of person you wanted at a party, or in a crowd. He knew everyone, remembered their names and could carry a conversation but also include you in it. He’d check in, take your hand, but didn’t hover. He could make you feel special by being in his presence, like in a room full of people he wanted to hear what you had to say. Not many people could do that.

Jonathan was exactly the kind of person you wanted to be alone with. Sometimes being alone with someone made you feel trapped, but with Jonathan it felt like respite. He was the person who you wanted to cut class with. He actually listened when you spoke instead of just waiting for his turn to speak, and he knew all the songs that would make your angst feel justified.

Out in his car, Nancy was able to be properly angry about the note.

“You know you’re not a slut, right?” Jonathan cut in when she was getting heavily into another emphatic demand to know who died and made anyone in that school the gatekeepers of morality.

Nancy paused, blinking at him. “You’re thinking that they’re only saying this stuff because they think you’re with both of us and you are. So you think maybe they’re right, but they aren’t. And even if you were, even if that’s all it took, you’re not doing anything wrong. So it’s not a bad thing to be.”

Jonathan spoke very little, but when he did it was always important. Nancy reached out to lace their fingers together. All of that fire inside her died down as he spoke, and she was left to quietly tend to the burning coals. “Where did you learn to see right through me, hm?” she asked softly.

Jonathan shrugged. “It’s what I would have been thinking.”

“Do you think we should have hidden it better? I don’t want this to become a problem for you and Steve, if they figure out it’s all three of us,” Nancy said as raindrops began to spatter, infrequent and small against the windshield. Their hands stay linked.

Jonathan shrugged again. They were quiet, and those infrequent raindrops made a sporadic tapping against the roof of the car, keeping uneven time. “I don’t know that they would figure it out, people are pretty stupid. Even if they did… People have called me queer my whole life, I don’t think it’s going to be that much of a change if they did. Might be new for Steve, though.”

He was quiet for a moment and added, “Ironically,” under his breath, and reclaimed his hand to pick at a fray thread on his sleeve.

Nancy was going to point out that there was a possible difference between seeming and being, a danger in it, but the general opinion of Hawkins High School was less important to her than the reality of the three of them. “What kind of bitter is that?” she asked softly and Jonathan didn’t look up from the threads he was worrying away at, pointedly not answering her.

After a few more long moments of silence, Jonathan spoke to his sleeve. “He says he likes me. How does he just _know_?” Jonathan asked, a note of pleading in his voice. A wanting for surety.

“How do you know you like me?” Nancy answered his question with another question because she herself didn’t have the answer.

Many times she’d looked at the girls in her class and wondered if she was infatuated, if thinking them beautiful was the same as wanting them, if wanting them meant the same things as wanting boys. Steve’s apparent confidence, if not ease, in how he felt was a mystery to her too, and Billy’s might as well have been the Bermuda triangle for all she understood of it. She’d come up with a few theories, about how some things were undeniable about yourself and that if you just were still and didn’t bother thinking about it too hard, they’d come to you. And also the idea that Billy would probably fuck anything with a pulse.

Jonathan tilted his head back as he thought about it. The rain was beginning to commit to the idea of a shower, and the patternless tapping on the roof increased in pace and volume.

“It’s a thing that’s there,” Jonathan winced at the clumsiness of his words but Nancy didn’t step in to rush him; she didn’t bother to tell him how that made perfect sense to her just as it was. “Or it’s like a thing that I can return to, a touch stone. I don’t know when it got there, but it is there. And when I think of you, I know it’s there. But when I think of Steve, it’s not _not_ there, it’s… it’s like it’s a possibility, instead of a thing.”

“Like you’re saving a space for him?” Nancy asked softly.

“Yes,” Jonathan agreed, looking at her like he never expected anyone to understand. He was funny like that. He thought he was an island.

Nancy smiled fondly, the rain came in earnest, warping the world through the window as water poured down the glass. They were the only two people in the world, the grey light marbled their skin. “That’s what it felt like when I started liking you.”

“Why are you always straightening us out?” Jonathan asked after a pause, looking at her, looking through her.

Nancy laughed, sharp and automatic, amused without thinking about it. “What else would I do?”

“Straighten yourself out?” Jonathan offered.

“I don’t need straightening out,” Nancy answered imperiously. But something inside her disagreed, something inside her twisted a little tighter. A clock that was always quietly counting down until something happened again. Waiting for the world to split open. “You two are the complicated ones.”

**Billy**

“Word on the street is your girl’s a slut,” Billy said by way of a greeting, stepping up to Steve in the hallway while he searched his locker for a textbook.

“Excuse me?” Steve answered sharply, a note of disbelief almost cracking his voice. He nearly hit his head as he stood too quickly. This alone almost made it worth sacrificing the precious minutes he could have been smoking before next period. People moved around them, shouted to each other, and shuffled from class to class. No one else seemed to notice Steve nearly scalp himself on the metal shelf at the center of his locker.

“You heard me,” Billy hummed with a chuckle, leaning against the locker next to Steve’s. He could have repeated it, it was very satisfying to say after her high and mighty hissy fit at him in February. She hadn’t bothered speaking to him since, and he, for the most part, did an excellent job pretending she didn’t exist. He didn’t even think of her when he left marks on her boy below the collarbone anymore.

Steve looked offended and a little gob-smacked as he slammed his locker shut and gave Billy his undivided attention, waiting for him to elaborate. He didn’t look very surprised though, interesting.

“Who’s word? Who’s saying that?” Steve finally demanded.

Billy absently twirled an unlit cigarette between his fingers, tapping it restlessly against his other wrist. He shrugged broadly, lips curling into a smile. “Everyone’s word. Everybody’s talking about it.”

“Uh-huh,” Steve said with a roll of his eyes. “And why haven’t I heard anything about it if  _everyone_ is talking about it?”

“You _are_ hearing about it. From me.” Steve could be so dense, he was very lucky he was pretty. “Most people like to talk shit about people behind their backs. Me - I like to do it to their faces. See the pain in their eyes, the whole bit,” Billy explained gesturing to Steve’s eyes with two fingers, justifying his intense gaze towards his face

“Honestly, I just wanted to congratulate you. She didn’t seem to be the sort to put out at all,” Billy paused, waving his cigarette absently as he figured out the correct words to describe Nancy. “She has that whole Amish librarian prude thing going for her,” Billy finished.

Steve responded in kind by opening his locker back up in a sharp motion, hitting Billy’s shoulder with it as he bent to get his book again. Billy rebutted by shoving it back, letting it hit off of Steve’s shoulder. Not hard. It was a flirt if anything, he _could_ have slammed his head in the door with the way he bent like that.

Steve never seemed to think that far ahead though, he went with the flow. A brief moment passed where they were both shoving the locker door back and forth before Steve located his book and slammed the whole thing shut, slapping his lock on it and stomping off into the thinning crowd.

“I mean as long as she’s sharing the love, right? Be a real shame to be dating a slut and not getting any,” Billy mused, following after Steve.

He turned back around, delightfully reactive.

“Don’t call her that,” Steve hissed, looking around like Billy was somehow going to infect the good opinion of those around them with his vulgar words.

“Hey, it’s your business if you wanna play cuckold to that freak Byers. But I call ‘em like I see ‘em.”

Steve paled a little, grabbing hold of a handful of Billy’s sleeve, pulling him over to the side of the hall. “What did you just say?”

“‘Cuckold’, Steve, get a vocabulary,” Billy said with a playful smirk, knowing full well he’d hit a nerve by mentioning Jonathan Byers’ name. A point of tension. Billy hadn’t been paying much attention to the insipid love triangle when he arrived in Indiana, but it was very interesting to everyone else and he’d heard plenty of versions from plenty of people because King Steve was a much beloved topic of conversation.  
  
“Billy,” Steve sighed, imploring or tired. Either way it sounded just a little like begging. This appealed to Billy, but not enough to make him stop poking at the wound.  
  
“Word is that Byers’ is the one she’s whoring around with. Unless you count the people who say _technically_ she’s whoring around with you because Jonathan was her boyfriend when last they checked. Naughty. You two just passing her back and forth? You know there are other girls in this town, right? Some of them even dress like they’re from this century.”

He was comfortably in his stride with being insulting, but Steve only stared at him with a helpless kind of resignation. He swore mildly under his breath.

“I gotta get to class,” he said, glancing at the clock and backing away from Billy.

In the wake of a wholly unsatisfying non-reaction something nagged at Billy. He watched Steve jog away from him down the hall and towards his next class, but he just couldn’t put his finger on what that something was.


	5. May 1985

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's buzzword is Bisexual.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's the end of Pride month and season 3 is nearly upon us. Just a casual reminder that this story will not feature any of season 3, for better or worse.

**Jonathan**

“Byers!”

Jonathan stopped short with his fingers wrapped around the door handle to the school dark room, his camera bag slung over his shoulder. He didn’t really want to turn around and acknowledge the voice that had called to him, but would rather stop than have Billy potentially follow him into the enclosed space of the dark room. He waited, very still, like perhaps if he was motionless the blond would lose interest, his vision requiring movement to detect.

Jonathan had learned long ago how to be a very uninteresting target, which when you were perpetually a target anyways, was the best sort of target to be.

Billy’s presence became obvious behind him before he ducked around to lean against the wall beside the door. He expression was friendly in the way people can be when they want something. Jonathan had no idea what he could possibly want from him.

“It’s Jonathan, right?” Billy asked.

Jonathan let his eyes wander over Billy in a slow, mistrusting fashion, treating him like a crime scene, looking for weapons or motive or any fresh blood. There was something needlessly typical about him, about his height and the breadth of his shoulders, the masculine cut of his features. He’d practically been stamped on the forehead with the word ‘Jock’ and he made no effort to slip from under the weight of it.

There was the possibility he used all of that as a shield from the incongruent parts of himself, but that in and of itself was typical. Billy didn’t seem bothered by Jonathan’s careful scrutiny. Really, he seemed to enjoy being looked at.

“You dated Nancy Wheeler, right?” Billy inquired when Jonathan offered no reaction to being asked his name.

Oh, no thank you. Whatever this was intended to be. No thank you.

“I don’t think we’ve ever spoken,” Jonathan said, not answering his question for a second time. He raised his gaze to meet Billy’s in a staring contest of sorts. His lashes were long, Jonathan wondered if he disliked that about himself. “I don’t think I want to start.”

Billy’s head cocked and he chuckled, tonguing the inside of his cheek, displaying a smile that bared his teeth to Jonathan.

“Look, I get how it’s a sore spot,” Billy said, his voice barely hiding the fact he was annoyed at not immediately getting what he wanted. Whatever that was.

There was a strange distortion of reality between them. Billy didn’t know that Jonathan knew about him and Steve, he also didn’t know that Jonathan, Steve and Nancy had forgone love triangles onto something else. But Jonathan didn’t know what Billy was trying to pry out of him. He couldn’t imagine it to be friendly curiosity if he wasn’t talking to Steve about it.

Jonathan watched him, his hand still on the door handle, his thumb dragging back and forth against the smooth brushed metal of it. The sensation like a whispering sound.

“She’s back with Steve now – sort of an on-again-off-again disaster, those two. I still see you and Nancy around together though, doesn’t that mess you up?” Billy proceeded like they were having a conversation.

“Do I seem messed up?” Jonathan asked flatly. Billy didn’t take the bait, though it looked as though he had to physically bite his tongue to do so.

“You just don’t see people stay friends with their exes like that – or with the guy who stole their girlfriend.” If nothing else could be said for Billy, he certainly was persistent. A dog with a bone. There was some sort of drama he was trying to stir up, or a disaster he was attempting to cause – but Jonathan wasn’t going to participate.

Even if this had happened back when Nancy and Steve had first got together, and Jonathan had spent his evenings compiling what may have been the world’s most heart shattering mixed tape, he wouldn’t have participated. Billy was persistent but Jonathan was loyal. He tried to find a point just past Billy’s head, to stare through him.

“She must be pretty special,” Billy prompted, like he was trying to coax the correct answer out of a child.

“I’m sorry, is there a question here?” Jonathan asked.

“Yeah, actually, were you dropped on your head or are you just that pathetic?” Billy growled. He turned in an instant, the way swimmers flip when they reach the wall, pushing off immediately in the other direction.

Billy’s eyes were dark blue and rage lit them up like a storm on the sea. His frustration seemed larger than him, and it wasn’t like he was a diminutive figure to start off with. The anger swelled inside of him, pressed to his skin like it was trying to escape, the lines of his arms suddenly taut. “You follow her around like a puppy and she’s with Steve now, you hang out with the two of them – do you get off on it? Or is it true what everyone says about you, that you’re a queer? Hoping for a threesome with Steve?”

Jonathan wondered if irony alone was enough to strike them both down.

He really could work himself into a froth off of nothing. Jonathan kept his brow even and his expression blank. He breathed in, and out, and listened to the sound of it behind his ears. It was entirely likely that Billy was going to lash out with something other than his sharp tongue, but Jonathan didn’t see a way back from that now. It wasn’t ideal, but at least he hadn’t let him corner him in the dark room.

“Or do you just have a fucking screw loose?” Billy demanded, snapping his fingers in Jonathan’s face like he was trying to break him out of a stupor.

That achieved some reaction, Jonathan leaned back from the intrusion into his personal space with a mild grimace. “Are you done?” he requested.

Billy blinked at him, squinting briefly like he couldn’t fathom what he was seeing in front of him, like Jonathan’s existence and motivations would become clearer if he just tried harder to focus on the vision of him. Eventually he just shook his head, disgusted. 

“You’re done anyways,” he scoffed, pushing off the wall to walk past Jonathan. As he passed he let his shoulder hit against Jonathan’s in a way that crushed him briefly against the door. He held the breath that tried to wheeze out of his lungs and Billy moved past him. 

“I’ll let you develop your pervy pictures,” Billy tossed over his shoulder, missing the only reaction Jonathan couldn’t stifle, his face burning unpleasantly.

**Nancy**

Nancy could not actually believe what happened had just happened.

The hallway was crowded with bodies all headed off to lunch in the various directions that involved. Nancy maneuvered her way through the people searching for the familiar figure of Jonathan, following his usual route out towards the parking lot where they generally ate their lunches.

She spotted him on the path through the grass that was mostly just worn down from foot traffic and turned to mud when it rained. Nancy rushed up on him, her brain still trying to unravel the events that had just transpired, trying to line them up with the feeling of her racing heart.

“I uh – I just kissed a girl in the bathroom,” Nancy said, her hand all bunched up in the sleeve of Jonathan’s t-shirt. She’d tugged him off towards his car with a shell shocked air she knew for sure was freaking him out, but she was freaking out more. “Or… she kissed me in the bathroom,” Nancy corrected.

Her lips still tingled with the sensation of her and she wondered if her hands would stop shaking any time soon. Her knees felt like jello and she’d known immediately that it was Jonathan she’d have to find.

“What?” he finally managed, understandably perplexed, a certain crease in his brow telling her that he was thinking up a thousand answers before she even opened her mouth. She wanted to shush his brain but she knew that was beyond impossible.

“So - I knew it was Kimberly who was putting the slut notes in my locker and spreading all these rumours around, and she walks into the bathroom while I’m washing my hands and she’s right there in the mirror behind me, staring a me like a deer in the headlights… And I think, yeah! She should be afraid! And I spin around and I am tearing a strip off of her,” Nancy paused, it felt like it was still happening, like she was walking Kimberly back against the paper towel dispensers with her righteous fury. She did not look nearly as smug and gloating without her pack of friends; she’d seemed stricken and regretful of the harassment – or perhaps of being reprimanded.

“And I’m saying ‘I’ve never done anything to you, why would you do that to me? Do you hate me?’ and she just blurts out ‘No – I like you!’ and like dives at me – I thought she was starting a fight – but she kissed me? In the bathroom? Next to the paper towel dispenser… And then the bell rang,” Nancy said, the words sounding just as surreal and ridiculous as they’d felt in that moment.

“And what did you do?” Jonathan asked, that crease still there on his brow.

“I said ‘thanks’ and left to find you!” Nancy answered. Horror took her features. “Oh god, I said ‘thanks’ and left to find you!” she moaned, mortified. “Well I bet she doesn’t like me anymore!”

“Do you like her?” Jonathan asked, trying to follow the vein of this story despite the fact Nancy was relaying it haphazardly.

“She must have thought that – or that I _looked_ like someone who would like girls – right?” Nancy said, trying to lay out her thoughts, but they came through strange and light, a thrill in her stomach like she was spinning very fast. It made her laugh even though nothing was really funny except maybe her life. And the fact she thought ‘thanks’ and running off was an appropriate response.

Jonathan’s brow crease finally ironed itself, realization smoothing his features. “I don’t think there is a ‘looks like’, at least not as far as I can detect,” he said. “I mean really you should be asking Steve.”

“I wanted someone who would get it, get this,” Nancy said, gesturing over herself trying not to laugh still.

“The freak out?”

“Oh yeah – I am freaking out big time.”

“Because you liked it?” Jonathan hazarded a guess.

“I don’t know!” Nancy declared loudly, scaring some birds from a nearby tree. People turned to look at her but quickly got absorbed back into what they were doing. “It was so sudden! I don’t know her – I mean, she has pretty hair, but does that mean I like her? Or the kiss? I don’t know that I’m a girl-kissing-person – like it wasn’t bad – would it have been bad if I wasn’t a girl-kissing-person? Or is kissing just nice?” She lowered her voice to strained whisper.

“I have zero answers,” Jonathan said, holding up his hand to form a zero like a camera lens. “But a lot of empathy, that’s things with Steve in a nutshell.”

Nancy considered this and then considered her thoughts. “Do you ever just want to pin him down and figure it out for good?”

“If I thought that would work I’d give it a shot. Do you think that would work with Kimberly?” Jonathan asked. “Slut-rumour-Kimberly?”

“Don’t use the Billy tone on Kimberly!” Nancy defended, crossing her arms, trying to be offended, but the giggles that had made a home in her chest still hadn’t left. “Oh god, she kind of is a Billy isn’t she?” she laughed. “But only emotionally.”

“I’m so thrilled she’s only fractured your eye socket emotionally, that makes me feel a lot better about it,” Jonathan said dryly.

“Oh shut up! I’m not going to start going on late night drives with Kimberly,” Nancy said, beginning to giggle again. She liked all the syllables that made up her name. “Or am I?”

“I vote not.”

Nancy turned towards the door of the car, tugging at the handle rather than answering. Jonathan obliged in taking out his keys and opening up the passenger side door, letting her slip in before he went around to the other side to let himself in.

He was good at silence, which was another reason she had wanted to find him. Nancy knew she didn’t have all of the words yet. She lowered herself in the seat surrounded by that familiar smell of Jonathan’s car and tried to nail some down.

“I don’t think I like Kimberly,” she confessed, searching for the lever that would put the seat back, bracing a foot against the dashboard because the old mechanism didn’t go easily. It creaked loudly and only set her back about four inches but she’d take it.

“Good,” Jonathan said, not one to mince words.

“But maybe I am a girl-kissing-person,” she added, reaching up to tug down the visor.

“Maybe you are,” Jonathan agreed.

“But I’m definitely a boy-kissing-person still,” she assured, and he laughed a little in that way that showed he knew that without her saying it. “I haven’t been awakened or anything.”

“As long as you’re a me-kissing-person,” Jonathan said, the roundabout words sounding strange from him. “I think it’s fine if something’s been ‘awakened’ in you.” He added air quotes, trying not to laugh. Nancy let her hand fall down from where it had been occupied with the visor, allowing it flop down on Jonathan’s shoulder in a half-hearted swat.

“I like that she likes me,” Nancy confessed, turning over onto her side, her cheek pressed to the back of the seat, worrying her lip between her teeth. “I’m not… some insatiable slut, am I? I’m not just going to take in all the love the world can possibly give me and never be satisfied with it, am I?”

Jonathan shrugged. The big questions didn’t phase him, and his lack of panic always prevented a spiral. His careful consideration made her worries feel legitimate but also not all consuming.

“Are you unsatisfied with Steve and me?” he asked like that was not the sort of question that could shatter hearts. He didn’t pick at his sleeve or fiddle in his seat. Jonathan was insecure in many ways, but his faith in her and them was certain. It was warming.

“No,” she assured, softly rubbing her hand over Jonathan’s arm. He smiled, letting their hands link together

“Well then, I don’t think you have to be worried about never being satisfied,” Jonathan pointed out.

She smiled at him, grateful for his surety, it made her sure as well. “I’m glad you’re the first person I told.”

“What can I say; I am the bisexual beacon,” Jonathan said taking his hand back to dig into his bag for his lunch.

Nancy laughed, ignoring her own bag. Her stomach felt full of the madness of the afternoon. She sat up, righting the seat, which creaked horrendously once again.

“It _is_ sort of absurd we all found each other,” she mused. She’d often thought on that fact since January, and it just seemed all the more remarkable. Maybe there was a such thing as fate, or maybe anyone was capable of that sort of thing and they had just chosen to open themselves to it where some wouldn’t.

Or maybe they’d just all grown up on quarry water and were all a little skewed for it.  

She was about to pose the question to Jonathan for his opinion when her attention got snatched up through the window and across the parking lot where Billy was sat on the hood of his car, staring daggers at them.

“…Why is Billy looking at us like he’s trying to set the car on fire with his mind?” Nancy asked curiously.

“Probably because he tried to ask me about you earlier today and I shut him out,” Jonathan answered before biting into his apple. “He’s after something, I don’t know what though.”

Nancy hummed thoughtfully as she watched him through the glass. It was impossible for him to know that Kimberly had kissed her, and Nancy couldn’t imagine he was any better at connecting the dots than he had been last month or he would have done something more than glare. She waved her hand delicately at him, a little ripple of her fingers. He didn’t react at all and she couldn’t be sure if he could even see her through the glass at that distance or if he was being purposefully static.  

“Do you want me to beat him up for you?” she teased lightly.

Jonathan laughed around his mouthful of apple, pressing his wrist over his mouth until he’d swallowed. “I don’t think we need to resort to that just yet.”

“Well, you let me know,” she smiled. “I got your back.”

**Steve**

Jonathan had a shift after school, so Steve was going to drive Nancy home. She climbed into the front passenger seat with a restless sort of energy. She opened the visor but only glanced at the mirror before snapping it shut again and moved on to the glove box, opening it up and poking through the contents before snapping that shut and putting her shoulder strap behind her, and then in front of her, and then behind her again.

Steve watched her, wondering if this is what people felt like watching him exist in the world, it certainly brought about the questions he got asked.

“You alright?” he asked, eyebrows arched up.

“What?” she replied. “Oh. Yeah! Do you have gum?” she asked, opening the glove compartment again, but he could tell she already knew there was no gum in there; she just stared before closing it again.

“I don’t think so. Do you want to get some on the way home?” he answered. Nervousness seeped into him at the seams. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Nancy like this. He tried to throw his mind back before Halloween, the time when she’d been falling apart and he’d spent his time trying to get her to smile like before instead of figuring out the way they’d get to smiling in the reality of after. The bit of time where he’d lost her. Had she searched his car for gum? Was she falling apart now? Had she been yesterday?

“Nope,” she answered, popping the p sound and folding her hands between her knees like they would only still if pinned. She looked at him after a moment and he was wholly aware he was watching her like she might explode at any moment.

“Are those girls still bothering you?” Steve asked. “I can talk to them if you want me to.”

Nancy narrowed her eyes at him. “Did Jonathan tell you?”

The reality of the end of this semester began to dawn on him. The fact that he would be finished with school in June and that she and Jonathan would be returning for their final year without him floated to the surface of all the concern. Maybe this was it, the ‘one last summer’ talk. A few of his classmates had already had the talk amongst themselves. ‘Death row for relationships,’ a teacher had teasingly called it, and he could no longer feel his fingertips wrapped around the steering wheel.

“Tell me what?”

Nancy blew out a breath into her curled bangs, pushing them up off her forehead briefly. “I kissed Kimberly.”

The information took a moment to reach Steve in a way he understood. His brain had been so expectant for something else it took her words and folded them over a few times before he even registered what they meant. Relief came first and he laughed. “What?”

“Well – she kissed me – it was this whole dramatic scene where I was yelling at her for the rumours and then she just kissed me! Like it was a movie or something,” Nancy explained, her hands reclaimed to express the story. A smile slipped onto her face, dispelling the last traces of concern, though not necessarily any of the confusion.

“Kimberly Garland? High ponytail Kimberly?” Steve asked, a little boggled. “Kimberly Garland movie-kissed you?”

“The very same.”

Steve imagined the moment; Kimberly taking up Nancy’s face in her hands, kissing her to a swelling of strings in true teen drama fashion. It was impossible not to, just as it was impossible to fold up the grin that had begun to plaster itself across his face as the image shifted itself towards a very different genre of film. Nancy laughed, swatting him on the shoulder.

“Stop thinking about it like that! Shouldn’t you be affronted for my honour?” she asked, clearly not upset.

“Am I affronted for your honour when Jonathan kisses you?” he countered.

“Kimberly isn’t my boyfriend,” she pointed out.

“Is she going to be?” Steve asked, curious. It seemed like the appropriate question to ask here. “Er – girlfriend,” he corrected.

“Nah,” Nancy answered, leaning back into her seat, a smile still on her face. “It was a pretty nice kiss though.”

“And you want me to stop thinking about it,” he teased.

Nancy was quiet for a bit, Steve drank in the moment where he thought things were coming to a screaming halt but really they were just getting bigger and more complicated – and how glad he was for the vastness and the complication of it all. It had room for all of them and he could not be more grateful for that.

This was not their one last summer. The security of it made a content home in his marrow.

“How did you know you liked guys?” Nancy asked.

“Are we comparing bisexual awakenings?” Steve teased.

Nancy’s eyebrows arched up. “Look at you with the terminology.”

Steve laughed and shrugged, not terribly offended. He was not usually the one to be trotting out the SAT words, that was more of Nancy’s thing.

“Don’t sound so surprised. Sometimes I listen when Jonathan talks,” he tilted his head back against the seat. “And I guess that’s sort of where it started? Well - I guess where it was unavoidable. When he would be talking and I’d just be so caught up in how _smart_ he is, and how funny – and like he never talks to anyone?”

Steve laughed a little, looking over at Nancy, hoping that she understood what he meant. He knew they shared liking Jonathan but they had never really sat down and talked about it. She smiled back at him, nodding in agreement, and he carried on.

“So it was just like – holy shit, how lucky are we to see him like this? And then he’d stretch and I’d see his hipbone and completely lose my mind, y’know – as any straight guy does,” Steve chuckled, rubbing the side of his nose and gave a small shrug.

There were a thousand little threads all throughout his life that were pulled together in those moments with Jonathan. It was funny how effortless the painstaking work of ignoring that part of himself had felt. So much so that when it became unavoidable, it felt that it had come out of nowhere and it had spooked him badly.

When he thought about the version of himself that had very consciously leaned into Nancy, the ease all used up, he thought of struggling to keep up the steps of a dance he hadn’t known he was doing. The conversations with his bathroom mirror. The desire for someone to open up the whirring mess of his mind and tell him it would be fine. Wanting so badly for Nancy to be that person. 

And then inevitably Billy stomping into the minefield of his sexuality and blowing the whole thing up.

“Are you okay?” he asked Nancy, reaching out to touch her cheek.

She leaned into the touch like an affectionate cat, her eyes closing, a sigh making its way out of her that seemed like it had been the only thing keeping her up.

“Yeah,” she nodded after a long while, kissing the palm of his hand. “The world isn’t ending or anything.”

“No but like – I get how it’s sort of – a time,” Steve fumbled with his words.

“Yeah, I think I’ve had some idea for a while,” she carried on. “This just makes it – like you said, unavoidable.”

He wanted to talk to her about Billy, but knew she probably wouldn’t want to hear about him. He wanted to say how it had felt hectic and completely unreal in a way that monsters didn’t touch. This strange and impossible thing that they just made possible in moving closer.

Mostly it was the feeling he wanted to talk about, the fact that eventually, the wrongness wears off like any novelty. Eventually it felt normal, and not just in the way that humans could adjust to absolutely anything, but in a way that made him wonder how anyone had ever gotten so far up their own ass on the topic to begin with…

And a little bit he just wanted to talk about Billy, how rough and unceremonious and completely thrilling it was. Steve chewed his tongue to keep from saying anything.

Nancy broke the silence. “You would have just been fine if I’d started seeing Kimberly?”

Her tone was sort of amused and sort of incredulous. Steve considered this question for a moment, trying to see if there was some part of the idea that snagged his thoughts. But all he could think about was the last time they had a conversation about bringing someone else into their relationship they had been in the car as well. The air had been different between them, but the idea that things could be reshaped to include all their potentially jagged edges had been such a relief to him.

“Well, I heard this really smart thing from a really smart, brave person I know. She said ‘maybe we don’t have to choose’,” he said, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye.

She chuckled. “How far does that stretch, do you think?”

He shrugged, folding a leg up under himself since they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon. “However far we need it to.”

“Ever the optimist,” Nancy teased, chewing thoughtfully on her lower lip.

“Well why not? We’ve come this far haven’t we? So what if it gets a little bigger and more complicated – if it stops working, we regroup and make a new game plan. But for now I don’t see why you can’t have a girlfriend or kiss girls.”

“Or more boys?” Nancy asked. She sounded like she was trying to get a flinch out of him, but he didn’t feel like flinching.

“Or more boys,” Steve confirmed. “Maybe more boys _and_ girls at the same time, maybe I’m there, I don’t know, I’m just throwing things out there.”

Nancy laughed. “I am sensing an ulterior motive here.”

“Me? Never,” Steve grinned, reaching out for her hand, taking it in his and tracing his thumb over the peaks of her knuckles. “I’ve never even heard of an orgy, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Are we orgy people?” Nancy said, her voice full of laughter still even if she was no longer giggling. He kissed the back of her hand.

“I think maybe we have the potential to be orgy people, which is exciting, don’t you think? I mean if it’s going to be anyone it’s going to be us. That should have been my ‘most likely’. Missed opportunity,” Steve sighed. “I love that we get to figure out what we’re going to be together and – y’know – separately. I love what you are, and I like that I get to learn that you like girls.”

Nancy flushed, pleased, and squeezed his hand. He tugged her closer, catching her lips briefly, kissing the smothered smile that shaped them.

“I like that I get to learn that you aspire to orgies, it says a lot about you,” Nancy teased in return, not yet comfortable with the vulnerability of something so newly out in the open.

“Well, you’ve always called me an optimist.”

**Billy**

“Hey, hey, hey! Watch the upholstery!” Billy chastised as Steve tucked a foot up on the seat to retie his shoelace, his leg folded up against his chest, knee by his shoulder. Steve arched an eyebrow at him.

“I think it’s seen worse,” Steve pointed out, but lowered his heel from the edge of the seat all the same.

“You crack the vinyl and you’re dead to me,” Billy warned. He ignored Steve’s point because he was mostly right. They got up to all sorts of filth in the car. Which was partly why Billy was so protective of it.

Steve laughed. “Well it’s good that you care about _something,_ we’d all hoped it might be something with a pulse but at least you’re not just rage in a hollow shell.”

“Keep crying about how I’m not in love with you Harrington, it really gets me going,” Billy retorted.

Billy hadn’t slept in his car since moving to Hawkins. Mostly because they’d arrived in September, it was already cold and had yet to fully stop being cold in his opinion, and he really wasn’t interested in freezing to death in his car. He refused to die so quietly.

Back in California he didn’t make a habit of it, but having the option was nice, most of the time that was all that was needed for something to be bearable for Billy. With the wheel of the Camaro against his palms he felt like he had options. He could put the pedal to the floor and put Hawkins in his rear view mirror, he could drive it right through his living room window and into his father and nothing could stop him as long as he had the gas to do it. The power of those options was enough to sustain him. Entertaining the thought, really delving into the gory details, and then choosing to take his foot off the gas was this private thrill that kept him sane.

Some would argue that the presence of the gory details negated sane, but everyone has to work with the cards they’re dealt.

Sure, there were plenty of times that the fuse was far too short to play with fire. There were times he would see red and he had no choice but to ride it out to the other side. He didn’t relish those moments, those times that he’d come back to himself with bruised knuckles and that shaky feeling of adrenaline slipping away. Those times that reminded him of his father.

If Billy had any choice at all in the chaos of the world, he hoped he wouldn’t turn out like him. Sometimes it felt like he was fighting fate, but if nothing else Billy was stubborn and could take a hit. All he really wanted at the end of the day was a little control. 

“I bet it does,” Steve answered while he rolled down the window. May was warming up but the wind that rushed in was cool and smelled like the consideration of rain. “Would it make you nervous if I leaned out the window?”

“Be my guest. How many points do I get if I splatter you against a road sign?” Billy shouted over the wind.

To his strange credit, Steve pushed himself up and out of the window but did not put his shoes back up on the seat. He braced his feet to the floor and rested his hip against the window ledge, one arm on the roof, leaning into the rush like he was flying. Billy waited until he was completely upright and then jerked the wheel a bit, playful really, nearly unbalancing him, though certainly not enough to knock him out with his feet on the floor.

Steve yelped and laughed out the words, “Go fuck yourself!”

“Why the hell would I have you in my car if I was going to do that?” Billy grinned back.

When the novelty of leaning into the chilling wind had worn off and Steve had dropped himself back into his seat, Billy looked at him in half glances away from the road.

The Camaro gave him that, too. A pocket of the universe where it didn’t matter if he took a look at Steve, or let his hand claim his thigh, or any of the other things he did to him that fogged the glass. He owned the space, the power of it suited him.

When he’d come to Hawkins he’d resigned himself to the idea that he’d be spending a lot of time with his hand, and he was even vaguely confident no one would catch his eye in a way that would make that difficult to put up with. But of course Steve very rudely existed, and he was so much every boy Billy had ever looked at it was very nearly funny. Tall, dark hair, dark eyes, clueless and sweet. Billy hadn’t always been aware he had type but Steve made it sort of impossible to ignore.

His mouth almost made that Podunk town tolerable. Almost.

At the end of the day, the thing that got Billy through until the next morning was that he’d get out of there properly. He knew people thought he was stupid but he kept his grades where they needed to be and he’d use basketball as a ticket out of Hawkins and his father’s house.

That space in the universe that Billy owned would get bigger even if he had to claw it wider all on his own, and he’d do it right so no one could take it away from him.

He’d go away to school, and by that time Steve would have graduated and gone on to his plans for After, whatever those may have been. Billy didn’t ask, really he didn’t care, because eventually when he put all of Hawkins in his rear view he knew that would include Steve.

Steve’s knee tipped open a little farther under Billy’s palm, bumping up against the center console and exposing the warm inseam of his jeans to Billy’s reach. An invitation to touch that he obliged with another glance over at Steve who smiled at him.

The window was still wide open and cool air tugged at their clothing and chilled their skin. His fingertips obliged the silent request, dipping lower, traveling further up Steve’s thigh. There was nothing that could make him regret his plans to leave and stake a bigger claim in his life.

That being said, there was nothing that could stop him from enjoying the sliver of what he had now, either.


	6. June 1985

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter, Billy reacts poorly to kindness and Steve graduates! Sexy things happen and feelings things happen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some post-season 3 healing. They can't reach us here.

**Billy**

“I can’t believe you get out of here a week earlier than the rest of us saps,” Billy huffed, pulling his t-shirt off. The thin material clung to him even before practice. Summer in Indiana stuck to his skin without the relief of the Ocean; he was constant fire.

Smugly, he was aware that fact drew Steve’s eye.

“Time off for good behaviour, I guess,” Billy stretched luxuriously, because he could feel Steve’s eyes on him and knew in a busy locker room there was nothing he could do about it. He slung the school t-shirt over his shoulder, not about to put something on he was just going to take off again, and looked over at Steve.

“I just handed you an ‘if that’s the case you’re never getting out of here’ joke, keep up, Harrington,” Billy told him with exasperated disappointment. Steve’s staring was a little conspicuous; Billy’s ego was stroked gloriously. Which was almost his favourite thing to get stroked.

But then Steve reached out for him and Billy had to step back, a look of incredulity turning his features. It may have been hot and _he_ may have been hot but neither of those things made this a touching sort of game. He still had a year in this place, and a lifetime in his skin.

Steve, oblivious to the locker room, and oblivious to Billy’s seething, frowned and extended his hand. This time, he pointed. “Does that hurt?”

The fire was suddenly ice, a chill all over his skin. “What?”

Steve gestured annoyedly and stepped forward. Billy took an immediate step back. Retreat wasn’t his style, but he didn’t want this. Steve was graduating, they were almost done. This part didn’t need to happen.

But Steve couldn’t be anything but what he was, guileless, open, constantly _trying._

“No – look –” Steve argued, misreading the caginess, he thought Billy thought it was an advance. Billy wished it were in that moment.

He reached for Billy’s elbow, lifting it, trying to reveal the smattering of bruising on his ribs, closer to his armpit, mostly hidden, entirely forgotten. It hurt but they always hurt, and it had stopped mattering so much. That one had just been Billy not falling correctly. If he hadn’t tried to catch himself on the dining room chair, he wouldn’t have a bruise.

Billy shoved Steve back. The other boys paused what they were doing to look at the clang of a body hitting a locker. The heat frayed everyone’s tempers and seeing someone go off brought a deep satisfaction. They were all eager to watch even if they wouldn’t participate. Animals. Billy would think of them as a pack of wolves, but they didn’t have the balls for it. Sheep. Bloodthirsty sheep.

“Mind your own fucking business,” Billy snarled. Steve put his hands up, immediate surrender to defuse the situation, but he looked at Billy in a way that saw too much. Billy would rather those bewildered doe eyes asking ‘why is he like this?’ or even ‘fuck you too Hargrove,’ instead of ‘I see you’. The ice of his skin made a home in his chest.

“Didn’t know the weekend was such a touchy subject,” Steve said and it took Billy only a moment to realize that he was saving Billy from the topic amongst their hungry audience. Billy took a step back, rolling broad shoulders, trying to shake off the chill. He couldn’t manage to unclench his fists.

“Yeah, well, your mom told me not to say anything about it,” Billy returned after a few huffed breaths. Steve lowered his hands, laughed a little. A noise that told everyone else they were just playing and the game was done. Without the promise of a fight, the locker room became as it had been, conversations picking back up where they left off.

Steve was always up on his toes, always moving his damn feet. It made him easy to knock down, but it also made him quick, and he was so stubborn, he always got back up. He wouldn’t leave this alone. Billy could have lied, should have lied. It came as easy as breathing most of the time.

Inhale: ‘Got in a fight.’

Exhale: ‘You should see the other guy.’

The words just wouldn’t come when Steve was looking at him like there was something so seriously wrong. It was an overreaction both for the bruising and for their arrangement. Other kids got beat, and what did it matter to Steve if Billy did? He couldn’t possibly _actually_ care. He just thought he did, a phantom feeling he was used to having around other people, it was just the way he was. Steve had a prying kind of nature, but Billy wasn’t a sideshow. He wasn’t interested in making anyone else feel better by being a place they could put their pity. The last thing he needed was someone thinking he was helpless. Billy Hargrove was not helpless.

Billy was rough with him out on the court. If he cared so much about bruises, he should probably do a better job of avoiding them.

But every time Billy knocked him down, Steve got right back up. So stubborn.

Billy cut class for the rest of the day, it was a day made for skipping anyways. It was hard to stay in class when the end of the year loomed close, freedom an earnest promise instead of a casually mentioned possibility. Or as much freedom as was ever possible. So much of these tail end classes were just spent melting into the surface of a desk, the air too thick to manage thoughts.

Billy hadn’t gone very far. There wasn’t anywhere to really _go_ in Hawkins to begin with, and he didn’t want anyone telling his father he wasn’t in school. Mostly he’d just sat in his car and listened to music, door wide open to keep the dark blue Camaro from becoming a solar oven. This made a neat little three walled fort of sorts, the Camaro and her flung open door being two, the third was a slate grey something-or-other parked beside him that may or may not have had a scratch when Billy opened the door. Regardless of before, it sure did now.

Somewhere around the start of last period Steve let himself in to the passenger side without so much as a knock on the window.

“Jesus, it’s hot in here,” Steve hissed by way of a greeting, aligning himself so as little skin as possible touched the vinyl seat. Billy could tell by the way his skin pinked up that the heat stung him. Serves him right for wearing those shorts, Billy thought to himself, flicking an imperious look over him.

“No one asked you to come in here,” Billy pointed out.

“Are you trying to recreate your home environment?” Steve asked, ignoring Billy’s lack of hospitality. Billy supposed if Steve wanted hospitality he would seek out his girlfriend. Billy could only ever be what he was.

“Nothing can make _Indiana_ anything like Cali,” Billy sneered, reaching for the volume of his music, turning it up like he intended to drown out Steve’s presence.

“I meant Hell,” Steve called over the scream of a guitar. Billy rolled his eyes over to Steve, unimpressed with the casually blasphemous tease. Steve, on the other hand, was incredibly proud of himself, and he grinned back. “Just trying to keep up, Hargrove.”

The words from the locker room were tossed back to him like they weren’t already making their way around and around and around his head. Billy lowered the radio again. “Did you want something?”

It was a challenge, a threat. _Did you want a fight? I’m not afraid to get blood on these seats._

“Yes,” Steve said, but the grin on his face was a little crooked now. How he made it look so dirty and so naïve at the same time, Billy would never be able to understand. Maybe it had something to do with the way he looked out at him from beneath his lashes, tilted his head, begged for it with a glance, offered his throat with a look.

Billy thought that he might have stood a chance sticking to girls if they didn’t make boys like they made Steve Harrington. Anger and wanting got so confused in him sometimes that it was easy to switch gears. He’d do anything as long as it wasn’t talking about earlier.

Billy stared at him, long enough to make the smile falter a little, for Steve to wonder if he was about to be kicked out of the car, and then Billy shut the driver’s side door with a snap and brought the engine to roaring life. Steve settled in and pulled the seatbelt over himself. Billy didn’t bother. 

Steve opened up the window as they turned out of the parking lot, catching wind, gaining speed. It did ridiculous things to his hair, not that Billy was _looking,_ just that it was impossible not to notice.

The road framed them between two towering rows of trees and an achingly blue sky, and everything felt wide open and careless. Which wasn’t quite the same as carefree, but it was the brand that Billy stuck by. Carefree was jubilant, and effortless; careless was the gas pedal pressed so hard to the floor, his calf knotted. Careless was accessible to Billy.

They had a few spots but Billy took them to the abandoned farm they frequented most. It was the sort of place teenagers went to get into trouble, and that’s what they were doing.

The farmhouse gaped like a skull, weather bleached with windows and door just empty blackness. It was nestled amongst overgrown brush in a clearing of trees that created the illusion of being much more remote than it was.

The first time they’d visited this place, Steve had told a rambling story about how he and his friends used to come out here and dare each other into the house, about how he held the record, standing in the dark for half an hour on a Halloween night. Billy had been quietly impressed and had loudly asked if Steve was done talking and could put his mouth towards a better cause. 

These days, its novelty had worn out on the locals (the farmhouse, not oral sex), or its visage had become too grim and the road in had grown over, almost impossible to find. Steve kept track of it though, knew where it was and directed Billy to it by sitting up closer to the dash, nudging Billy’s arm with the back of his hand, like his body was some kind of compass.

Billy slowed to line them up but took the suggestion of the path with more speed than was really kind to the Camaro. Careless. Billy was rough on the things he kept and disastrous on the things he didn’t. He wondered if it was an inherited trait, and then he parked and pushed Steve into the back so he wouldn’t have to wonder about anything at all.

They parked in the shade but the heat caught up with them as soon as the car stopped. The cicadas screamed in the trees. Steve was all limbs and need, pulling Billy closer, always closer, sweat already marking the places they touched. It tried to bind them together. They were a thunderstorm, all humidity and heat and electricity, the promise of relief on the other side of all that chaos.

Steve made the sweetest noises, but Billy kept hearing ‘Does that hurt?’ again and again. He pushed his thumb into a bruise on Steve’s hip he’d probably received from him in gym that day. Billy wasn’t fragile.

Steve gripped him with one hand, clinging to his shoulder, fingers dug in, the sensation asymmetrical and avoidant of the bruises on the other side. Suddenly everything seemed too close, the air unbearable, unbreathable, the places his skin touched Steve’s felt chafed and stuck. Billy pulled all the way back, ending up in the front passenger seat, his back to the door.

The window was still open, a breeze ran its fingers along the sweated back of his neck. It didn’t calm him any. He counted backwards from 10. Anger and wanting were so often the same thing.

And there it was at last, the ‘Why is he like this?’ look of bewilderment on Steve’s face, his shorts at his knees, his shirt shoved up. He looked debauched even if they hadn’t really gotten anywhere, Billy’s jeans were still in place, though his shirt was lost somewhere in the small space.

“You don’t have to act like you give a shit about me,” Billy pointed out finally. “This isn’t a hand holding, give-a-fuck-to-get-a-fuck kinda deal. It just kind of pisses me off.”

Steve stayed where he was, possibly because he couldn’t think and move at the same time, or possibly because he was stuck, there was really no room in that back seat. His brows furrowed into something like confusion, trying to track the conversation and the course that lead them here, and then made the easy jump over to disbelief. “Wow. I’ve heard of a pity-fuck, but I’ve never heard of a self-pity-fuck. That’s something special, Billy, really,” he sighed pulling his shorts up, his cock having lost interest in the proceedings.

“Fuck you,” Billy bit back while Steve was trying to rearrange himself to get out of the back seat. It was difficult to argue with someone who was realigning their limbs like a contortionist, but Billy could argue with just about anyone, just about anywhere.

“Yeah. That’s what I was _trying_ for,” Steve answered somehow making ‘yeah’ into two brisk syllables. Ye _-Ah._

“You were _trying_ to handle me! I’m not your little girlfriend, I don’t give a fuck about you, so don’t give a fuck about me.”

Steve, meanwhile, had got himself turned the right way, he rested a hand on each of the seats, leaning forward into Billy’s space. “Get over yourself.”

Billy didn’t answer because Steve was too close to him for him to throw a decent punch at him, which would have been the standard response.

“I give a shit – what a goddamn travesty, Billy. Someone gives a shit about you! Oh no! The thing that just happens when two people see each other often enough! I can’t just turn that off,” Steve carried on because no fist had stopped him, though the anger that shimmered around Billy seemed to be a physical thing between them.

He climbed over into the driver’s seat. All very much in Billy’s space who growled and gave Steve a shove to move him along, or protest the move, Billy wasn’t even sure which. He did know that as Steve settled into the seat he had the perfect image of grabbing a fist full of his hair and slamming his head back on the open window ledge. He twisted his hand so tightly into the seatbelt it bit into his skin. 

“But amazingly enough that means I’m _not_ going to dig around where you don’t want me to.”

Billy blinked at him. The tension of anger twisting around in him, not giving up its position, trying to reshape itself in a way that suited the situation. But it was futile, a snake eating its own tail. He didn’t understand.

Steve sat down, mirroring Billy’s position, though he had the steering wheel to negotiate around and much longer legs.

“Your walls aren’t exactly hard to navigate, dumbass, I’m not looking to get my nose broken,” Steve huffed out.

Billy found his walls exceptionally hard to navigate. Sometimes he could barely move for all the barriers. 

Another breeze passed through the clearing, delivered in through the open window it moved Steve’s hair. The sun was rudely slanting in through the windshield, all the world wanting to press in on this conversation. The light reflected gold in Steve’s eyes, it followed the line of his jaw and the glimmering salt of sweat made him look ethereal somehow instead of overheated. A dream Billy had had too many times but could never quite remember, and yet there he was, real and infuriating. He hated to look at him and he couldn’t look away. 

Steve acted like it was simple. 

“You might get it anyway,” Billy muttered, his tongue making a threat out of habit instead of intention. 

Steve nudged Billy’s thigh with the heel of his shoe, a kick with about as much intention as Billy’s threat. 

“Jesus it’s hot in here,” he reiterated and twisted to escape.

Billy watched him struggle out of the unusual position in the seat. First to twist and reach the handle behind him, then to push it open, ending in him pulling himself out practically backwards through the door. It was hilarious and Billy followed him out on the same side so he wouldn’t look as foolish.

“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up,” Steve encouraged, picking himself up from the grass and leaning on the flank of the car, watching Billy exit. 

Billy dug in his pockets for his cigarettes, offering the pack to Steve though he always declined. He lit one up, the smoke feeling right against the ashes of pointless anger.

The heat of summer was heavy against them and it was too much for Billy to try to think in. Thoughts of what Steve thought he knew, or how he cared, were too much to untangle. Instead, he smoked his cigarette to the filter and tossed it into the wild brush of the property and then pressed Steve up against the heated metal of the car. There was more room this way.

“Still up for it or have you gone completely soft on me?” Billy breathed against his neck.

“Does that feel soft to you, Hargrove?"

**Nancy**

It really couldn’t be considered skipping class when it was so close to the end of the year – and really, it was the school’s fault for booking the graduation ceremony during school hours. There was no reality Nancy could fathom in which she wasn’t going to watch Steve cross that stage. She excused herself from class on the pretense of going to the bathroom and made her way down through the quiet halls to the exit that would bring her closest to the grassy field that was used for soccer, football and graduation ceremonies.

Jonathan waited by the double doors, hands in his pockets, and despite the fact that he looked like the dictionary definition of skulking, she was delighted that he felt the same way she did.

“You think we’ll get in trouble for this?” Nancy asked conversationally and unconcerned as she put her weight against the heavy door, stepping out into the brilliant sunshine.

“It’s the end of the year, what can they do to us?” Jonathan answered, following her out so they could cross towards the stage that had been set up and decorated before a grouping of chairs for parents and family. A lot of people stood or crouched to scope out the best place to take pictures, beyond that a few of their classmates had the same idea and lingered around behind the seats, so they blended in nicely.

The sky was brilliantly blue above them and made everything under the sun seem brighter, more colourful. The grass was ultra green, the brass of the instruments playing in the school band glinted, the red in everyone’s face from the heat was obvious. It was hot in a staggering sort of way, and yet Jonathan was still in jeans.

A hush eased over the crowd, not all at once but slowly, as everyone spotted the graduates leaving the school, one single file line of dark gowned figures crossing the grass. It was funny how tradition could make something so unnerving in its components common place, or exciting.

“Can you believe we’re going to be going to school without Steve in September?” Nancy asked, watching as their upperclassmen drew near. She’d gone to school with these people for three years but didn’t necessarily know them well, she only knew some of their names. Knowing she’d be returning to school in their position, at the top of the food chain, seemed surreal. Last stop before… well, anything really. The idea was a little baffling.

“Last September in Hawkins,” Jonathan pointed out and Nancy felt a chill tingle up her spine despite the warm weather.

“Sounds ominous.”

“We’ve handled worse.”

Nancy smiled at that, it was true.

The Ceremony itself mostly just involved a lot of speeches that weren’t very interesting. The Principal spoke and the Valedictorian spoke and the Vice Principal spoke and the President of the PTA spoke while Nancy shifted her weight from foot to foot, wondering if anyone would notice if she just sat down in the grass. She knew the back of her neck was burning under the baking sun.

When it came to the graduates receiving their diplomas things began to speed up, last names called in alphabetical order eventually brought them to H’s. At this point everyone had reduced their applause to a sedate golf clap, but Nancy and Jonathan had been saving up all of their enthusiasm for Harrington, Steve.

Both of them cheered loudly, turning a few heads in the crowd and rising eyebrows from the teachers on the stage. But best of all, Steve looked around with a grin and then, diploma in hand, hopped right off the center of the stage to scattered laughter and gasps from the audience. He charged up the center aisle that had been created to make seating easier and went straight to Nancy.

She held her arms out to him like she was beckoning a rambunctious puppy into her arms, the expression of delight would certainly be the same in either case. He barely avoided crashing into her when he pulled her into a kiss and then drew back to look at Jonathan, briefly frozen before he gave him an affectionate thump on the arm, and turned to get back in the procession as they headed off for a photo op of some sort.

His gown billowed around him and he had to hold on to his silly flat hat as he charged back off to a few scattered cheers from the amused crowd. The rest of the graduation carried on as though Steve stepping out of the organized routine was hardly of notice.

“We picked the best one,” Nancy said to Jonathan, putting her chin on his shoulder, smiling, her cheeks a little pink from something other than the sun.

Jonathan disagreed with grand gestures and public displays, but all the same he smiled too.

As they went through other names, Nancy and Jonathan snuck off to a picnic bench beneath a heavily shaded oak tree that they’d all decided to meet at when everything was finished. The table itself was more carved graffiti than wood. A thousand students before them telling the world that they were here, and would love so and so ‘4ever’, and what bands were worthy of being carved on its surface. 

Nancy ran her finger tip over the textured surface. Weather had worn it down so splinters weren’t too much of a threat. The leaves overhead shifted with the breeze, and Nancy liked the way the shadows of them moved over Jonathan’s face. “Do you have a knife on you?” 

Jonathan arched an eyebrow at her and shook his head. “Making your mark?”

“Our mark, I thought I’d put our initials,” Nancy hummed. She sat with her legs tucked under the table and Jonathan sat beside her in the opposite direction, leaning his back on the table’s edge. “For the best, really. Maybe when we graduate I will.” 

“Next year already,” Jonathan pointed out. 

The reality of it rushed through her again, strange and huge, the unknown of it made fear nip at the edges of her feelings. That anxious countdown doing so in great loud thumps against her ribcage. 

“Doesn’t it feel like it’s going by too fast?” she asked softly. 

“Not always, not to me. I mean, yeah, it seems like when we’re all together it flies by, but other than that it drags,” Jonathan sighed running his hand through the back of his hair, ruffling it up to let the breeze reach his scalp. 

“When we’re all together?” Nancy asked, a hopeful edge to her voice. The wonder of them working together as a triptych chasing back the end of the world. 

“Yeah. You, me and Steve,” Jonathan answered. 

Jonathan caught her eye and smiled, fond and private and infuriatingly kissable. His attention was shifted away from her by a figure crossing the grass over to them. Steve’s hair was stylishly wild, even though it had been crushed under a grad cap, and his grin was sunshine bright. 

Nancy beamed at them both, her heart feeling impossibly full, like she’d need to close up her chest again before they left or everyone would be able to tell how completely enamored she was with her boys and the shape that they made together in the world. 

**Steve**

Steve’s parents had left a bottle of sparkling wine on the table with a card that read Congratulations in a looping script on the front. The only handwriting involved on the inside was ‘Steve’ and ‘Love Mom and Dad’ framing the typed text of the greeting. Steve figured that was only done so he’d know he had their blessing to make bad decisions with the bottle of wine in their absence.

Steve wasn’t sure where they were that particular night, but he was sure he was supposed to be grateful that they stayed long enough to take a photo with him by the punch bowl that had been set up in the gymnasium before disappearing.

Billy had not shown his face, but Steve had thought he’d heard AC/DC rattling someone’s windows in the parking lot while they were crossing the grass. It was hard to tell under the sound of the school band’s rendition of Pomp and Circumstance. Billy would deny it even if he had been there, so Steve wouldn’t ask.

It was just him and Nancy and Jonathan, they had the house to themselves. After terrorizing the grocery store and spending all together too much time in the pool, they were inside with damp hair and the orangey gold of sunset lighting up the windows. Steve gathered three champagne flutes, the delicate little glasses seemed hilariously over the top, but it felt correct in the way it clashed. They were going to take over the world together, therefore and for that reason, they should have fancy glasses.  

“You know, not all sparkling wine is Champagne,” Steve said in a haughty tone as he poured the effervescent liquid into the glasses. “Champagne is named for the grapes grown in that region of France.”  
  
His perfect imitation of his father was lost on the other two but it didn’t matter. He handed over a glass to each of them and Nancy held up her glass.  
  
“A toast,” she declared. 

“To the miracle of my graduation?” Steve teased, lifting his own.  
  
“To surviving,” Jonathan said, catching both of their attention up. “You’ve made it through high school _and_ monsters, I think you’re ready for just about anything life can throw at you. Cheers.”  
  
“To not getting too cocky about that,” Steve added with a pleased chuckle, clinking his glass to theirs. “Cheers.” 

“Slay together, stay together! Cheers,” Nancy chorused, and they all laughed as their glasses made the musical little sound off of each other. They swallowed down sparkling wine that was wasted on teenage palates but made their faces warm just the same. 

Steve switched on the record player and they split the bottle, getting tipsy on bubbles and a day of too much sun. Jonathan picked the songs and Nancy eased off her summer dress while she danced to the beat. It clung to her skin a little, like his own clothes, put on too soon out of the pool only to be taken off again. 

Steve kissed Nancy’s neck and avoided all the places she was sunburnt. She tasted like chlorine, and he was reminded of their first time. Their bodies moved together, dancing in the middle of his living room like it was the thing to do. Jonathan changed the song coming through the speakers, a reminder of present time, a welcome addition to old memories. 

So rarely after all that had happened did a feeling of deja vu feel welcome and sweet. It felt like a better version of that night with Jonathan’s music moving them like an intention. Deja vu but brighter.

There was a small, selfish part of him that ached to put hands on Jonathan, his presence in his gaze and the charge of the moment. Jonathan settled on one of the chairs with the tops of his cheeks pinkened and Steve couldn’t remember if that had been there from the sun. Steve’s hands ran down Nancy’s sides, her skin soft and the dip of her waist both lit him up and made him wonder after the firm angles that would make up Jonathan.

Nancy laughed lightly when a soft hum made its way out of Steve, his gaze focused on Jonathan shifting in the chair, readjusting himself, his palm smoothed over his thigh. Her lip was caught between her teeth and her hands cupped his face. 

“It’s okay,” she said, like she could read him like a book. Their lips met in a way that felt soft and hazy and inevitable with how all the edges blurred out into other lingering little touches.   
  
Nancy tugged away and made her way over to Jonathan, leaning over and kissing him. Steve always felt a little awed to watch them kiss, it felt so familiar and fascinating, the languid press of their mouths like they had forever and intended to use it up in those kisses. Nancy’s hands collected up Jonathan’s and tugged him to stand.  
  
“Let’s go upstairs,” she said, with the most beautiful kind of mischief in her voice. 

They didn’t quite fit three across on the stairs, but she kept both of their hands. She nudged Steve up in front but they all knew who the leader was in that moment. 

The sun had dipped lower and the faded light that came through the curtains was cool and soft and just enough that Steve didn’t bother with the light switch. It was Jonathan’s first time in his bedroom and he looked at it through his eyes, the unmade bed and the half opened sock drawer he hadn’t bothered to close when he got ready that morning were the only true signs of life.

Steve went and sat down on the bed, and Nancy released Jonathan to pick around the edge of the room, curious in his surroundings, and of them. Nancy settled over Steve, encouraged him back with the dip of the mattress and her kisses against his mouth and below his chin.

Eventually he was laid out and she was warm and sweet above him, her damp hair tickled his cheek. It was a mirror image of the first time, and when he sought out Jonathan in the space he found him silhouetted against the window, and everything felt like a second chance. He’d been there the first time too, at the window, and it had been messy and complicated and so much had gone wrong after.

But this was different. This was everything it should have been.

Jonathan sunk to the floor, his back against the wall and his palms running restless against the thighs of his jeans, and Nancy chuckled again. Steve pivoted his attention back to her, the sweetly amused twist of her lips and the blue of her eyes; she was focused on Jonathan, too. 

“It’s okay, you’re allowed,” she said to Jonathan with a note of teasing in her voice, saying what Steve was too frozen to say. She was bolder with him because she knew him better like this and Steve watched her, trying to absorb the things that she did, trying to learn the art of him. 

Jonathan chewed his lip a moment, in no hurry to bend to anyone’s authority. So when he did move, tilted his head back against the wall and leaned his hips up to undo the button of his jeans, the pop of the clasp sent such a ferocious spark of heat through Steve. Jonathan caught his eye and moved no further and Steve very nearly whimpered like a puppy. 

Nancy’s fingers caught his jaw, feather light and gentle, tilting him back towards her, and he was all too pleased to go. To kiss her and press the heat that seethed in his skin up against her, to feel her match it and press him deeper against the mattress with achingly sweet touches. What remained of their clothing was taken care of in these frantic little bursts, like each departure from the press of skin to skin was a lifetime, and that in being reunited they had to make up for lost time.

He thought he was lost to anything but her when a quiet hitch of breath from Jonathan thrilled through him, and with hands grabbing onto every bit of Nancy he could manage, he came undone like this was all brand new to him. 

Nancy bit into her lower lip and rolled them over, pulled him onto his side with his back to the window. That felt entirely unfair because all he wanted to do was look at Jonathan, but he deferred to her expertise. 

“He just came to the sound of you, Jon,” Nancy purred, and grinned when Steve’s face flushed.

Her gaze wandered over his shoulder and she bit her lip, somehow none of the heat was lost in watching Jonathan through the lens of Nancy watching him. Steve didn’t know if it was intentional or not, but all of a sudden, all he could hear was Jonathan. His soft breaths, the whisper of his movements. 

“He wants you,” she said, her gaze still on Jonathan.

There was this gorgeous sound, an unintentional gasp followed by the word “Fuck” that made it sound like the utterance of something sacred. The bed frame rattled like it had been kicked and the whole world felt like a dream because Jonathan had clearly just orgasmed.

Nancy met Steve’s gaze again, a playful little grin lit her up. “He wants you, too,” she promised softly. 

Steve didn’t realize he was hard again until he felt Nancy’s fingers trace over him. He laughed, breathless and giddy, his skin on fire. 

“You’re both trying to kill me before I even get to life after high school.”

“Are you complaining?”

“No.”

**Jonathan**

Steve came down the stairs, long legged and only in briefs, rubbing sleep from his eyes. The house was dark but the windows let in the light of the moon, turning the space and Steve into a black and white photograph. He made his way to him, standing in front of the chair Jonathan was sitting on.

“I thought you’d left,” Steve murmured, his voice rough with sleep.

“Nah. I just couldn’t sleep, thought I’d wrap your present,” Jonathan explained, holding up the newspaper wrapped gift.

“You got me a present?” Steve asked, he looked at him like he wasn’t sure if he was still asleep. The house was quiet, the noise of the woods behind the property was muffled, the song of crickets just a distant lilting tune.

“It’s nothing crazy,” Jonathan deflected but held it out to him all the same. He was unsure of it still, but offered it out so he couldn’t second guess himself and reconsider.

Steve took the present, ripping into the newspaper, the sound of tearing and crumpling seemed unnaturally loud, but it only took a moment to be stripped away. It was a framed photo of that day out in the woods in early March. Steve looked away from the camera, the end of a smile still holding on to the corners of his mouth like he’d been laughing a moment before, the fingers of his hand pushed his hair back, a glance of his wrist showed from the sleeve of his jacket.

It had seemed to Jonathan, when he’d developed the picture, that it had been so quintessentially the parts of Steve that were easy to adore. He wasn’t sure if it spoke that to anyone else, but he wanted to give Steve that moment of himself before everything would change again. All the good he hoped he’d take with him.

“It’s me,” Steve reported with a smile that crinkled his nose a little.

“It is,” Jonathan confirmed.

“I like it – does that make me full of myself?” Steve inquired very seriously, shifting his weight about like he was swaying to music. Jonathan couldn’t be sure if he was tired and trying to keep himself awake or just being his normal restless self.

“Only if you eat it,” Jonathan answered very seriously. 

There was a brief moment and then Steve laughed, trying to stifle the noise, probably not wanting to wake Nancy upstairs. He moved forward and, in a room full of furniture, eased himself to his knees on the carpet, resting his head on Jonathan’s thigh, draping his arm over his lap in a sort of hug, or an anchor to keep him upright. Jonathan paused a moment but then put his fingers into Steve’s hair, the feeling of product lingered in the strands but not enough to prevent scrubbing his fingers against his scalp.

“Thank you,” Steve murmured. Jonathan felt his mouth move against his jeans more than he heard him.

“It’s no big thing,” Jonathan answered automatically, his fingers moving through Steve’s hair a hypnotic sensation, even as the person doing the stroking.

Steve moved slowly, dragging his jaw and then his chin over Jonathan’s thigh to turn his other cheek against him, so that he was looking up at him. “You’re very talented and I like your present.”

Jonathan silently continued smoothing his fingers through Steve’s hair instead of replying, uncomfortable with being told he was talented. He watched Steve’s eyelids grow heavy, eyelashes fluttering briefly before they came down to kiss the top of his cheeks. They sat there for a while, the only keeper of time being the measured meter of Steve’s breath.

Love was such a strange, unquantifiable thing, but as his fingers toyed gently with the hair that touched the back of Steve’s neck, Jonathan knew he felt something in watching Steve sleep, a quiet pride, a fathomless affection. Eventually he drew his hand back, brushing Steve’s hair out of his face, the action intentionally firmer, an effort to wake him gently.

“You’re going to regret falling asleep on your knees, go back to bed,” Jonathan murmured when Steve’s consciousness was apparent, if not complete.

Steve did not reply so much as groan and try to bury his face against Jonathan’s thigh, as though this would somehow settle the matter.

“I mean it,” Jonathan’s tone warned, but Steve may or may not have fallen back asleep with his nose crushed to the outer seam of his jeans. With a sigh he pushed his hand into his hair, taking a firm grip that did not yank but put a consistent pressure against his scalp, making it an uncomfortable way to sleep.

Steve spoke, but directly into his leg, the sound entirely muffled.

“What?” Jonathan asked, trying not to sound too fond. 

Steve leaned back just enough to speak, eyes still closed. “Come back to bed with me.”

Jonathan didn’t reply right away, and Steve opened up one eye. “I’ll be your best friend,” he offered as a child would, a grin on his face. He was clearly amused with himself but hoping in the same breath that Jonathan would agree.

“That’s no good to me. You’re already my best friend.”

The grin became wider, brighter, a light of its own in the darkness of the house, and in the face of it Jonathan couldn’t fight smiling himself.

Here they were, at three in the morning, grinning at each other like idiots in the dark. Jonathan hadn’t really dreamed this up when Nancy first pitched the concept of bringing Steve into their relationship.

“Come to bed then, best friend,” Steve said, shifting to stand up. The framed photo still in one hand, he held the other out for Jonathan to grab.

He looked him over, his hair a little dishevelled and sleep obviously calling him, he still managed to be attractive in that tall and lanky way. Jonathan made a softly amused noise at the great shifts the universe had made around them all, bringing them to this moment, where Steve Harrington the prom king was standing in front of him, barely dressed and waiting for him to come to bed.

The ambiguous nature of their relationship didn’t make it any less funny.

He took Steve’s hand, using his grip as leverage to stand. Their hands parted again but he followed him up the modern stairs that reminded you how little was between your foot and the ground below.

They returned to Steve’s bedroom where Nancy had claimed the center of the bed, laying on her stomach, her face buried into the pillows.

Steve made his way around to the window side of the bed, his silhouette passed over the moon-bright curtains. He put the photograph safely on his nightstand before climbing in alongside Nancy. Jonathan took a moment longer, having to shed socks and jeans before he climbed in on the other side of her.

Nancy protested the shrinking of her domain with a small plaintive noise that ceased when Steve shifted over, his bare skin coming to touch hers. Even asleep she leaned into his presence, moved so that her back was to his chest. Jonathan smiled at the scene, touched when her arm sprawled out to reach for him in the empty space in front of her.

They all pulled in closer, Nancy settling with her head tucked against Jonathan’s shoulder, her legs tangled in Steve’s, her arm across Jonathan’s middle. Steve’s arm crossed her, his hand resting feather light on Jonathan’s hip and his face buried contentedly in Nancy’s hair. It was summer, and warm to be so close even in the air conditioning, but it was nice as well, and after only a moment of thought Jonathan reached down to lace his fingers into Steve’s.

Steve’s fingers squeezed his, just barely, maybe nothing more than a reflex.

Jonathan had never slept particularly well, even before. That night, with his two best friends in his grasp, he fell asleep before he had the chance to overthink it.


	7. July 1985

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Billy finds out the trio is a triad which makes everything a little more complicated for everyone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember when Billy was a nice mannerly boy who didn't confuse attempted blackmail with flirting? Nah, me neither.

**Billy**

Billy missed the Ocean.

He’d still think about going down to the surf when he woke up with his sheets stuck to his skin and the room hot like a physical entity pressed up against him. It would take a few moments for his mind to travel back from California, jet lagged and in a bad mood to find itself in Indiana, with a hankering to take it out on someone. Usually Steve.

Some days he’d drag himself down to the quarry, into the water. A lake was not the same as the Ocean. It played gently and felt limited and stagnated. It tasted like a mouthful of blood. Or else the ragged skin inside his cheek his Dad had slapped against his teeth made everything taste like that.

Mostly he’d just go with a cold shower and avoid bodies of water all together.

The sun in Indiana worked just as well as the sun in California though, and he spent most of his time sans shirt, becoming an even golden brown. He was rather proud and vain of the tan-lines he’d been cultivating with shorts that were probably why his Dad had slapped him last. If he was going to get hit anyway, he might as well enjoy the fact he’d made his neighbour water her bird feeder for about a minute before she caught on that he knew she was staring.

Steve’s parents were away on some tropical beach or rich people retreat to recover from the emotional exhaustion of being wealthy, or whatever. They were hardly home even without the word vacation involved, which seemed to be the perfect situation to Billy, but Steve moped about it from time to time.

Billy wandered in through the woods, like Steve had showed him. The water in the pool calling to Billy, a siren song from a temptress who reeked of chlorine, but his attention was snatched up by movement and skin behind the voyeur-friendly full length windows.

There was Nancy, and the curve of her back, an uninterrupted stretch of skin. From a distance, Billy could see the appeal. Skin was skin, a body rocking and gasping was the same as another. Honestly he was surprised this hadn’t happened before, with Steve seeing Nancy and having no desire to close his curtains. He tucked himself out of obvious sight, even though he was pretty sure they weren’t going to notice him anytime soon.

Hands dragged down her sides and she tilted her head back, dark hair draping down towards her shoulders, and Billy got a view of the person kissing her collarbone. Decidedly not Steve; Jonathan Byers, if Billy had to guess by stupid bowl cut alone. Billy perked up, thrumming with a twist of delight that only came from being handed a weapon. 

They were doing it in Steve’s house. That was brutal. Maybe he’d congratulate her on her absolute viciousness before he told Steve.

But then… Steve walked in, shoulders all relaxed and his shirt somewhere else. His hair looked damp like he was coming from the shower. He laughed and bent over Nancy to kiss her while she grinned up into his mouth. His hand dragged affectionate fingers through the straight strands of Jonathan’s hair, who seemed engrossed in kissing Nancy’s chest.

“What the absolute fuck,” Billy muttered to himself.

Billy wasn’t naïve, he knew what a threesome was, but that didn’t _look_ like a sex-fueled summer romp. It reeked of domesticity and was markedly tender in a way that made Billy want to gag. He remembered the way Steve had reacted to the rumour that Nancy was slutting around with Jonathan like he’d finally managed to rip off the hangnail that had been driving him crazy.

This was an even better weapon. Three pronged, explosive. Billy could hardly contain himself. It was impossible to stuff away the manic grin that had taken his face as he strode up, knocking on the glass and startling all three of them like fish in an aquarium.

“Yeah we’re getting complaints about indecency, you kids wanna wrap it up,” he said, motioning in a circle with his finger like one of the the Chief’s deputies would.

They were a hilarious tableau for only a moment, all shock at getting caught when the curtains were wide open. Nancy was the first to move, getting herself out of the frame to keep her modesty or something, Jonathan pulled a cushion into his lap as she exited, and Steve moved forward to open the back door.

“Billy?” He said his name like a question, like he couldn’t fathom how Billy was in his backyard. He had that freshly washed look about him, aside from the bewilderment. Billy grinned wide and feral and the rush of it felt almost like a knife in his gut. Sharp and hot. Oh, they were all so screwed, he had them in the palm of his hand. They were coated in gasoline and Billy had a match, and he was thrumming with the idea of setting them ablaze.

“Steve,” he nodded cordially, and leaned to the side to acknowledge Jonathan inside with a salute. “Freakshow.”

It was lucky he did that little bit, even though Jonathan only reacted with a glower that could peel paint, because otherwise Steve would have entirely blocked his view of Nancy stomping back out, hauling a t-shirt down over her top half, clad in shorts and simmering fury. 

“What the hell are you doing here, Billy?” she gritted out immediately, shoving at him before she was even close enough to get a proper shove, but she kept coming. “See something you like, you fucking pervert?”

He shifted to meet her furious advance with one of his own, but Steve had reached out to gather her in his grasp, hauling her back from Billy. Whether to protect her or him, Billy couldn’t be sure because she still kicked out at him, struggling against Steve’s grip to get back into Billy’s space. From this angle, it was very funny.

“Nancy. Nice to see you, too,” Billy laughed. “All of you.”

She took this little jibe very well and kicked out at him again, bare foot, teeth bared.

“Alright, alright, everyone needs to calm down!” Steve shouted, which sounded very convincing and calming yelled over Nancy’s litany of growled curses. Eventually she twisted herself free, coming out with ruffled hair and a death glare, but she didn’t rush Billy again. She folded her arms sharply at her chest. Jonathan, clothed again, leaned against the doorway. The hot air of summer drifted in behind him, the chill of air conditioning slipped out. 

“You gotta admit, this is pretty good. You’re all pretty fucked,” Billy grinned. 

Nancy opened her mouth, probably to remind Billy that she could reveal his proclivity for pinning the prom king to his backseat, but that news didn’t seem nearly as interesting as all the rest. In fact, if anything, it just reflected badly on Steve. But Steve reached out and touched her shoulder, shaking his head.

“C’mon in, we can talk about it,” Steve said, nodding towards the air conditioned interior.

“What’s there to talk about?” Billy scoffed back. “I have you guys by the balls.”

“And you’re just going to waste that on the rumour mill? On tattling?” Jonathan sighed from the doorway, turning to head in. “He’s not even that great at being the worst,” he tossed back behind him.

Which was completely unsatisfying, as far as reactions went. Billy knew he was being baited, but he couldn’t help but go after it. Sometimes you know your weaknesses but they hold you anyways. “I’ll show you the fucking worst,” he snarled.

Steve’s hand gripped his bicep as he made to stomp past, but only briefly, just long enough to redirect his trajectory and then step back with hands raised before he caught an elbow to the nose.

“It’s hot out,” he said very reasonably. The sun agreed, baking down over them; Steve’s hair was so much closer to dry than when he’d first stepped out. “Come in, cool down, we’ll talk about it,” he offered again with a note of pleading in his voice, and it was that acknowledgement that Billy actually held the cards here that soothed him in through the doorway. 

The inside of the house seemed dim and oversaturated after the ultra bright light of outside, the pavement around the pool, the burning blue of the sky. Steve got everyone a glass of water, the clinking of ice breaking up the quiet that had fallen over the three of them. 

“So how long has this been going on?” Billy asked conversationally, lapping up the discomfort.

Steve had leaned himself up against the arm of the couch and looked over to Nancy and Jonathan, who looked like they’d prefer making out with saw blades instead of talking about this. 

“The beginning of the year,” Steve spoke up.

Billy’s eyebrows arched up curiously. “Wow, the rumour mill was slow to that one. And here I thought you small town kids never did anything fun.”

**Jonathan**

Billy knowing made Jonathan’s skin crawl.

Beyond the simplicity of the fact that Billy had seen him while he was _inside_ Nancy, the vulnerability of it too much to think on very hard, he didn’t like being known — especially not by people who would misunderstand, twist things up and turn them into something else. Yes, they were all together, but that didn’t mean… well, anything. Not that it wasn’t important, just that it was not readily defined by the fact of it.

It was larger than the sum of its parts. It was a nuanced and specific thing, and people on the outside couldn’t see all the moving parts, all the very specific things that were true. He loved Nancy, he liked Steve, watching him touch Nancy sometimes felt just as good as touching Nancy himself, sometimes he couldn’t sleep for thinking of the sound of Steve’s laugh, and he’d kept all the ticket stubs from the movies they’d seen together, though he usually hated that sort of sappy memento.

There was this feeling of apprehension now, of being observed. The delicate thing they had was being handled in someone else’s mind, made simple and clumsy and dirty. And because it was Billy, he knew it was dirty under his inspection.

The way he looked at him had changed. Mostly it had changed in that Billy now looked at him. His gaze used to skip him over, a hole in the social ladder, only useful in the sport of him, but too jaded to the experience of being picked on to provide any satisfactory reaction.

Now Billy _looked_ at him, his gaze wondered at him, measured him up, took inventory of all the parts that were easily consumable, and then tongued all the incongruous edges.

“Gay?” his gaze asked. “No.” The incongruity answered, pointing to Nancy.

“Threat?” his gaze asked. “No.” The incongruity must have answered, pointing to how Steve still came to Billy like a puppy.

He could just imagine the disparaging notions about the sort of person who ‘lets’ the - what was Steve to him? Boyfriend? Partner? Best friend? - people they attach themselves to wander, to each other, to Billy. Billy was a being of conquest. Did Jonathan even truly have Steve if he did nothing with him but like him?

“Possibility?” his gaze asked. Jonathan had no way of knowing how he answered that question for Billy, but it made him sick to think on it.

He didn’t want to appeal to someone like Billy. He didn’t want Billy thinking about him in a way that didn’t include his clothing or Steve’s clothing, trying to sort out the organization of limbs, where mouths go and the orientations of bodies. Jonathan was still trying to sort that out in his own head, knowing Steve was politely toying with an image of his own. That was too many people thinking about him like that when, at present, he was only pleased by the idea of Nancy’s thoughts on the subject.

But it was a little worse, an insecure and sinking feeling, to think that image didn’t appeal at all.

Despite the fact that he, entirely and to the depth of his being, wanted nothing like that from Billy, the idea of being sized up for devouring and found wanting wounded in a strange and frustrating way. The insecurity was so old it made him feel small and young to bear it.

Jonathan’s head ached with thoughts and his skin prickled with observation.

“You’re quiet,” Nancy said softly. He could barely hear her over the din in his head, but she reached out and touched his wrist, and her words seemed to touch him at the same time.

“We’d prefer outward screaming to inward,” Steve said, and Jonathan resurfaced from his mind to realize everyone was looking at him, that feeling had been correct, but two out of the three people were… well, they were his people. He softened a little. 

Billy smirked at him, his eyebrows arching upward, agreeing with the statement in a very different way than Steve had intended it. Jonathan wasn’t particularly violent but he felt like he wouldn’t mind terribly if Billy were to get struck by lightning.

He narrowed his eyes at Billy in a way he hoped impressed upon him how completely he disagreed with his presence both physically and on the concept of their relationship.

“Whatever, nothing is worse than you knowing, so do what you want with it.”

“Ohhh, it could get _so_ much worse than just me knowing,” Billy laughed, his eyes lit with the possibility of ruin.

Jonathan looked at Steve out of the corner of his eye. He was in the continuous state of movement that occurred when he was nervous. His leg jiggled, he chewed at the outside of his nail. Steve didn’t know what to expect from Billy either.

The concept of Billy and Steve sickened Jonathan worse than ever in that moment. Billy took delicate things and made them dirty, he relished in ruining… These were not things he wanted for Steve, but he bit the tip of his tongue. Billy gave Steve something he didn’t, and he really didn’t want to start that conversation in the middle of all of this, or with Billy present in any capacity.

Billy let his gaze draw over each of them like fingers on piano keys, just for the sake of sound.

“But… we do have some mutually assured destruction here,” he noted casually before Nancy could. “Which would _normally_ be enough to keep us all out of each other’s way. But my thing only blows up my life – yours blows up three. And I’m guessing you all like each other enough to not want that for each other, even if you don’t care about it for yourselves.” His gaze focused again on Jonathan, as though he could see his indifference drying up when it was framed in Nancy and Steve’s well being. “Ain’t love a bummer?” 

The room was quiet, the silence loaded. Everyone held their breath, trying not to breathe in the heavy space, the time before whatever would happen next. Billy drank from his glass, his Adam’s apple bobbed with three swallows as he kept them all suspended for his amusement.

“So maybe you owe me one,” he finished with a sense of finality.

“I’ll give you something,” Nancy muttered under her breath, the top of her chest still flushed with embarrassment or anger. Her hand was still on Jonathan’s wrist, and he shifted his hand into hers.

“Maybe!” Billy chirped his voice light, pleased, as he stood. “We’ll all just have to wait and see, won’t we?”

The open-endedness of this agreement sat with Jonathan about as well as any of the rest of the situation. There was nothing to keep Billy at one favour but his word. And even if Billy’s word was good for anything, it was still a blank cheque.

Beside him, Nancy pursed her lips, knowing there was nothing they could really do about it besides hope he lost interest or valued the anticipation over anything truly gruesome. On his other side, Steve’s shoulders relaxed, his faith in Billy confusing and concerning.

Billy made his way into Steve’s space, and by all accounts became closer to everyone than Jonathan was comfortable with. He grabbed a handful of Steve’s hair, not gently but not yanking, and shook his head a little, a controlled little jiggle that made Steve swat at him, his face going red.

“Looks like I was right about you, hm? Worse slut than I thought, though.”

It was said playfully, but his gaze wandered to Jonathan and Nancy, a silent challenge. Billy was testing out their possessiveness against his own, trying out the idea of using their affection like poison. Though Jonathan also got the sense he was trying out touching Steve while observed, showing his claim openly.

Nancy squeezed Jonathan’s hand, whether to comfort him or stop herself from saying something, he couldn’t be sure. Eventually Billy looked back at Steve, leaning in like he was going to kiss him. “You’re all freaks.”

There was a weird mixture of admiration and admonishment in the word, and Jonathan felt himself go red, ready for this to be over. Billy let go of Steve and started for the back door, the way they’d all come in. Steve followed him, still red, still walking him out.

Maybe they were all freaks.

“We can bury him in the woods and blame it on the government,” Nancy whispered against Jonathan’s ear, and the comfort of her closeness and the irreverence of the statement shocked a laugh out of him. A ragged breath of amusement. He turned back to her, so close their noses bumped together. “Are you okay?”

“Are you?” he deflected, and Nancy smiled grimly.

“We could take him,” she deflected back at him.

“Oh, definitely,” Jonathan agreed without irony.

**Steve**

“So you really _do_ just pass her back and forth.”

The heat of the summer was still waiting for them on the other side of the glass like a wall. Steve hadn’t bothered putting shoes on and the pavement outside of the shade cast by the house was oven hot against the soles of his feet. He made a quick dash to the grass to preserve his skin, and avoid engaging in Billy’s vocal equivalent of holding a magnifying glass over ants. It was certainly the sort of day for it.

Of course he knew better than to expect that Billy would have dropped it by the time he’d leisurely meandered over, hands in his pockets. The expression on his face gave Steve pause. It was not so much the cat who got the canary as it was the cat who got the canary, in a room full of canaries, and was now enjoying the knowledge that there would be much more where that came from. His sadistic streak was about a mile wide.

It was times like this that Steve did not have much of an argument against the whole ‘Billy’s terrible, you probably shouldn’t hook up with him’ thing that Nancy and Jonathan spoke in looks more than words.

“Or is it at the same time?” Billy carried on. “Spit roast her?”

“Stop,” Steve said, trying not to put too much into the word. If he was careful with his reactions, maybe Billy would drop it sooner rather than later.

“Or – _or,”_ he enthused as though he hadn’t heard him. “Does the Freakshow do you both? Do you get a train going? You sick fucks.”

No hope of sooner. “Stop it, Billy.”

“C’mon Steve, don’t be such a prude, give me the dirty details. Do you fuck him? Is that why you keep him around? Get to see how the other side lives?”

Steve felt heat cross his cheeks and the tops of his ears that had nothing to do with the harsh sunshine. The air had the heavy feeling of an oncoming storm, but the sky was cloudless. It probably had more to do with the hard line of Billy’s jaw than the threat of rain. Things with Jonathan were complicated and delicate and practically the direct opposite of what went on between Steve and Billy.

“Don’t talk about them like that! I mean it.” He tried to sound firm, and he wished for all the world that his voice hadn’t shaken in the middle of it.

“ _‘I mean it.’_ ” Billy laughed. “Why the fuck not?”

“Because,” Steve began like it was a jab in an argument, but his voice softened at the end. “I’m dating them.”

It was his first time saying it out loud.

Dating them.

Both of them.

The warm fuzzy feeling was cut short by Billy’s laughter spiking up in volume. Steve rolled his eyes, putting his hands on his hips, waiting for Billy to wear himself out.

“Oh you’re _dating_ them, are you? _‘It’s more than sex, it’s a spiritual connection’_ ,” Billy mocked. He took on a lisping affectation for the last part, before laughing in a manner that could best be described by anyone as cackling.

“Are you proud of yourself? Did you get what you wanted?” Steve asked, unamused.

“Mm, no, what I wanted was a blowjob about 2,000 miles south-west of here, but life is full of disappointments.”

Steve snorted and shook his head. He had this confidence that he couldn’t shake that Billy would keep his word, but Billy was giving him exactly nothing to reassure him that the notion wasn’t delusional. “You like being a dick too much, you know that? Most people don’t enjoy it as much as you do.”

“Are you seriously preaching ‘what most people do’ to me right now? How the hell would you know what most people do?” Billy asked, a smirk turned his lips. “Besides you, of course.”

Billy’s tongue travelled over the sharps of his teeth as though he was relishing the taste of the moment, a chuckle leaving him slowly. Steve thought that all the time he’d spent with Billy, on and off, when strung together would add up to something, some sort of context. But there was just Billy as he always was, and Steve with this weird idea that somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, his word was good.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anything else? Get it all out of your system,” Steve drawled, rolling his hand towards himself.

He wished he were a little less mortified by it all. It felt hard to stand his ground when he wanted to go bury his head somewhere.

“You wanna show me how much of a slut you are?” Billy purred, his tone changing. 

If Steve wasn’t going to get whiplash from Billy’s driving one of these days, he’d get whiplash from the hot and cold routine he favoured. He stepped forward and touched the waist of Steve’s shorts with calloused fingers. Goosebumps raised on Steve’s arms, a chill in the middle of summer. He was unbelievable. 

“Billy,” Steve sighed. The note of exhausted pleading in it was obvious.

“Come with me. I’m parked around the corner, I’ll take you for a ride,” his voice rumbled out of him; he was close, and the heat from his skin felt as scorching as the sun. 

“I have to get back in there,” Steve answered. It probably would have been harder to turn down had he been wearing shoes. 

Billy leaned a little closer, his breath on Steve’s jaw as he spoke softly. Everything about Steve leaned in to hear, to get more of whatever spell Billy cast over him.

“Would you do it for them?”

At first Steve thought Billy was trying to compare, see how far Steve would go for Nancy and Jonathan if not for him, where those boundaries intersected and what made up the differences. Realization eased up his spine and fell through him like ink dropped in water. His face burned but it wasn’t the only place he felt heat.

“Would you open your mouth to keep mine shut?”

Steve knew that there was something deeply messed up in the way that turned him on. He gaped at Billy, his mouth unconsciously obliging the request while he tried to fathom some sort of response to _that._  

Billy chuckled. “Nah. Waste of a favour. You’d do it for nothing. You should see your face though.” 

Billy’s fingertips tucked shallowly beneath the elastic of Steve’s shorts, he bit his lip in brief contemplation, but then he reclaimed his hands. “I should probably stop by the clinic on the way home anyways. Didn’t know you were letting just anyone fuck you.” 

“They are not just anyone,” Steve replied, finding his voice again. _You are not just anyone,_ stayed on the tip of his tongue, and he bit down on it to keep it there. 

“Whatever helps you sleep at night, you filthy degenerate,” Billy laughed as he made his way back into the tree line, ripping down a handful of leaves from the tree as he went. Because, well, of course he did. 

 **Nancy**  

“It’s okay,” she said, not like a reassurance but like a fact.

Jonathan had leaned his back against the arm of the couch and she’d fit herself like a puzzle piece between his thighs, leaning back against his chest. He was wearing jeans again even though it was summer, her fingers scraped gently over the fabric, grounding herself in the noise and sensation.

Nancy could practically hear his eyebrow raise behind her head.

Privacy was of utmost importance to Jonathan; he felt violated, and rightly so. The threat that more people would be inspecting their lives shook him and she understood, because she’d spent nights staring at her ceiling worrying about something exactly like this. However, now that it had happened to them, all Nancy could think was, is that all you’ve got? Billy knew what she looked like naked now but the world was still spinning, so far as she could tell.

“It is – we couldn’t expect to keep it a secret forever, and it’s just Billy. How long have we known about him and Steve?” she said, tilting her head a little to get a look at him, to see the dubious expression he was giving her.

“We weren’t going to tell anyone though,” Jonathan pointed out.

Nancy’s mouth twisted a little, her gaze ducking away to the fabric of the couch. “I may have threatened to, back in February. Just so he’d stop leaving him looking like he’d been abducted over the weekend.”

She hadn’t mentioned that little interaction to Jonathan, it wasn’t exactly a moment she was proud of. She wasn’t ashamed of it, she’d done it to make sure that Billy would know Steve had people looking out for him, that she wouldn’t accept the way he treated him even if Steve did. 

A sour feeling twisted her up as she thought about Billy’s hand in Steve’s hair. They were outside, and she could go to the door and see what was happening, but she dreaded what she might see.

Jonathan pulled her out of her thoughts with an amused chuckle, putting a kiss on the top of her head. “I wish I could have seen that.”

She smiled only faintly - it felt as though a chasm had opened up beneath her, sucking her down.

With Billy out of the room, she mourned the loss of their perfect secrecy with all the depth of a broken nail, but the way Steve had looked at Billy when he’d grabbed up his hair, that cut deep. It gouged into the middle of her and filled all the spaces up with bitter acid, curdled the blood in her veins, and scraped the back of her throat with a scream she didn’t utter. This poisonous feeling surged inside of her that she couldn’t quite name. Not quite anger and not quite jealousy and not quite hurt. Something big.

Nancy wrapped Jonathan’s arms around her shoulders, her hands in his, burying her face briefly into the crook of his elbow.

Nancy had thought of things between Billy and Steve as a want – a craving that was satisfied in their time together. But there had been a need in Steve, something she would have never known was there if she hadn’t seen it herself. This whole other part of him. A part of him that she’d never known but Billy had.

Jonathan leaned forward, resting his lips to the back of her head, but not in another kiss. “Are you still okay with Steve and Billy?”

Nancy didn’t trust her voice and so just shrugged, jostling Jonathan a little in the process.

“I’m not going to ask him to stop on a shrug, Nancy,” he tossed her own words back at her and she laughed a little, wetly, unaware that the tears had been so close. She was wearing Steve’s t-shirt instead of her own, it had been the closest when she grabbed it. It smelled like him. 

She resurfaced from his elbow. “Did you see the way he looked at him?”

The door slid open and Steve edged in with a hesitant posture and slightly dazed expression. He edged closer and she noticed his hair was lighter at the ends from the sun, and there was pale skin around his wrist from where his watch normally sat. He was so beautiful, but even though he was coming back inside, she felt like he’d been hauled away by a monster.

Which was ridiculous, of course. The thing between Billy and Steve hadn’t changed since February, it was what it had always been. It just felt different in observing it. It left the sense that she’d missed something, allowed something, that the world had changed around her while her eyes were closed.

Steve edged over like he was in trouble, and he didn’t seem to know where to put his hands. He fit himself with his back to the opposing arm of the couch, facing them as though he were awaiting judgement.

“Is he gone?” Her tone was colder than she meant it to be.

“Yeah, he left,” Steve said, shifting again, sitting on the arm of the couch, his elbows on his knees, fingers still fidgeting. “Are you guys okay?”

Steve looked at them with such a perfect concern in him, furrowing his brow and softening his eyes.

“I think we have all of our fingers and toes,” she answered. Jonathan shrugged, his arms still rested around her shoulders, but he’d straightened his back behind her so he could look at Steve properly.

“Just dandy,” he chimed in.

Steve tried to smile but the expression faltered. “I feel like this is all on me, I’m sorry,” he said.

“No,” Nancy answered, surprising herself. She didn’t know she meant it until she said it. “We can’t control everything – least of all Billy.”

Nancy untangled herself from Jon’s arms, leaning forward towards Steve. “But… I think we need some new rules.”

She glanced back at Jonathan and he nodded his approval. Steve’s gaze flicked back and forth between their faces, his fingers all folded tightly together, like he was praying with white knuckles. His leg began to bounce on the couch cushions, he folded it under himself when he felt how it shook the whole thing. “Yeah. Yeah, of course. I mean, that makes sense. New rules,” he took a moment to inhale a breath. “What are they?”

“I’m not going to ask you to stop seeing Billy,” she said. “I don’t think that’s possible right now – and even if it were, I get that it wouldn’t be fair. But I need you to know that I kind of want to right now.”

Her heart beat a steady rhythm against her ribcage but it ached with each one, she felt it behind her eyes and in her fingertips and balled up in her throat. Some truths felt like they took something in existing. This was one of them, it left a wound to hand it over.

Hopefully it would heal now that it could breathe in the open.

“Me too,” Jonathan added, putting his hand out onto her shoulder, a stabilizing force. Even though she had been sitting upright, it felt as though his hand was holding her up.

Steve nodded, still watching them. “That’s fair,” he said, pausing on the final word for a moment.

“You can’t tell him about us – whatever we do or don’t do together, that’s not any of his business,” Nancy said.

“Of course, yeah. I haven’t told him anything and I wouldn’t – that’s not – I wouldn’t do that,” Steve promised earnestly.

“And you can’t let him pull you away from us,” Nancy said, her voice trembled a bit, her vision swam with tears. “When you’re with us – just because he knows, you can’t let him pull you away all the time.”

Steve moved forward, closer to her, down onto their level. His expression was lost and aching as he put a hand on her ankle. “Nance, of course not.”

Nancy wanted to grab a handful of his hair and take him back, the way it felt that he had been taken from her. But when she reached into the dark strands of his hair, her fingers lighted gently, her nails dragging just softly against his scalp, and she could feel him, he hadn’t gone anywhere.

More than that, he leaned into the light reassurance of her hand with such ardent adoration. It was like a purr performed in the fibre of his being, he leaned in for the shelter of her affection from all that had happened.  

There was something she didn’t understand in what Billy gave him, something Steve needed and wouldn’t be able to find in her. But neither Jonathan or Steve had ever begrudged her the parts of each of them that were individual and precious. This whole thing had started because she’d believed that love and affection were not a finite resources.

Threatened.

She felt threatened by Billy when she hadn’t been before. She named the feeling inside of her and, like a demon, it lost much of its power. Not all of it, but enough that she could breathe.

Nancy would gag on her own tongue before she called what Billy and Steve had love, but there was something there, a part of Steve that needed and a part of Billy that answered that need. In loving Steve it was not her intention to take that away, to chip away the parts of him that did not rest comfortably against her. She would still worry, but their world had room for that too.

Nancy guided him closer, resting herself back against Jonathan’s chest and bringing Steve to hers. Another piece of the puzzle.

“What about you Jon? Any rules?” Steve asked, his bitten down nails scraping against that same patch of denim.

Jonathan was quiet a moment, and then cleared his throat carefully. “You use protection when you’re with Billy, right?”

Steve went quiet, and Nancy, sandwiched between them, felt her face getting very red when he answered, “Uh...”

It was a very important question about a very serious issue regarding their collective health, but the awkwardness that permeated them all at Steve’s non-answer only leant itself to another beat of silence before Nancy burst out laughing. Her laughter was infectious, catching first Steve, and then Jonathan.

Soon enough they were all completely lost in laughter, feeding into each other and making it worse, everyone twisted up against each other, curling in and trying to pull away. They eventually dislodged themselves into a heap on the ground, stuck between the couch and the coffee table.

Silence fell over them again as they all quietly tried to figure out how to untangle themselves from the situation.

“I blame Billy for this,” Nancy said, which set them all off again.


	8. August 1985

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summer is coming to a close and Steve gets his own place before he starts work for his father, Jonathan and Nancy are recovering from the great Ordeal of July, Billy comes by because he's going into anaphylaxis from a lack of attention.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Billy behaves badly - I feel it's a given at this point. 
> 
> I just wanted to take a quick second to thank everyone for your wonderful wonderful comments - you make my days with every one. The long ones, the short ones, I see people coming back every chapter and I am so incredibly touched by that. This has really been a passion project that I didn't really think would resonate with anyone and I am so grateful that it has. You can follow [in-forgetting](https://in-forgetting.tumblr.com/) for updates and maybe notes and extra content.

**Steve**

The house Steve’s parents had given him the keys to was a one floor, one bedroom, one bathroom bungalow. Like someone who had never heard of the concept of an apartment had a great idea to build a home circa 1970. The place was various shades of brown, inside and out, missing only a shag carpet to make it the perfect time machine to the previous decade.

It was very kind, really, even if it felt a little like they were shunting him out as quickly as humanly possible. Like they were setting him up with a job with his father and a house from his mother, patting themselves on the back for another project done on time and on budget.

All the same, it was still a house of his own. It came furnished, either because that’s how they’d been intending to rent it or at some point they realized their teenage son only really owned a bed and dresser. Those were to stay in their place anyways, for a guest bedroom Steve had to assume. He packed only the boxes of his own things: clothes, books, papers. It felt like he’d lived a liquid existence in that house and they’d poured him out into a new place, a new role.

Nancy and Jonathan came to help move him, assuaging the need for movers. Steve had grown up on a (debatably) healthy level of disconnect, but strangers transplanting his belongings into another space like professionals rehoming a disagreeable raccoon from the attic when they were too soft-hearted to have it killed – well, it seemed a little sterile, even to him.

To their credit, Mr. and Mrs. Harrington made an appearance, his father taking a box from Nancy’s arms as she was carrying it from the car. She managed a smile and an “Oh, thank you,” though Steve could tell she’d rather have just carried the box inside. His mother fussed about light fixtures and window treatments and filled the drawer with silverware, the cupboards with plates that all matched perfectly like she was staging the house for sale. He liked to think she was doing it because she cared how he lived and not that it was habit.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do without you around,” she sighed, and Steve was cautiously optimistic about the emotional weight of the confession. 

“Speak to your father, I guess,” she said and made a face. “Perish the thought,” she laughed.

It was a very funny joke, about how they couldn’t stand each other. Steve didn’t laugh because he’d heard it a thousand times. Also because he didn’t think he’d ever be able to stomach talking about Nancy or Jonathan or even Billy like that to people.

“Well, you can always visit,” Steve said with a tight smile.

“Oh, you don’t want your mother around cramping your style,” she dismissed with a wave of her hand and continued to fill the cupboards with dishes she’d chosen for him.

Steve went back out to the living room where his father was telling Nancy about how she should enjoy men lifting things for her while she still could. She looked at Steve with a caged desire to scream rattling the bars aggressively, her teeth grit together in a smile. Jonathan had retreated to a safe distance, putting books on a built-in bookshelf, glancing up only to wonder if they were going to have to hide a body together.

“Nancy lifts her own boxes. Jonathan and I are going to get one of those carry-around-thrones for her though,” Steve said, pretending to dust off Nancy’s shoulder, her smile eased into something natural as she laughed. “Give her her due.”

“Well just don’t let it come to blows when one of you has to marry her,” his father laughed and the comment sat awkwardly over the three of them. The kind of thing that bids a desire to move it, to change it, fold it up and pack it away where it belonged, instead of letting it ooze into the places it didn’t fit. But there was too much that couldn’t be said.

“Thanks for the advice, Dad,” with an eye roll on the side was Steve’s only available rebuttal.

They didn’t stay for long. Once the boxes were all in and the cupboards had been set up to his mother’s satisfaction, they gathered themselves to leave.

His father pushed a twenty into his palm. “Order a pizza, it’s a moving tradition,” he said it like a commandment, though it seemed like a pretty good idea. Aside from dishes, his cupboards were currently empty. “And don’t stay up too late, you’ve got work in the morning.”

“I know,” he said, trying not to sound like it was a disappointing reality. This was what people did after all, grew up, moved out, went to work.

The door was barely closed, Steve had just felt the latch click into place when Nancy sighed from behind him. “ _Finally_.”

He turned around just in time to see her pulling her sundress up and over her head in one quick motion. She stood in only her underwear in the strange in between space of the living room and the door the designer never thought to assign a purpose to. It felt sort of brazen in an exciting way but at the same time claimed the space in a way Steve hadn’t prepared to do.

“We’re christening the house, right? That was always the plan, right?” she asked when no one immediately followed her lead.

“Nancy, they just got out the door,” Jonathan laughed.

“Exactly! They’re gone now! We never have to wear pants again if we don’t want to.”

Steve had once been given detention for carving an ‘S’ into the surface of his desk with a compass. This seemed like a much more enjoyable way of going about it. Steve tugged his shirt up over his head.

“They could walk back in here,” Jonathan pointed out, though the sounds of the Harringtons opening up the doors on their car was obvious. Steve reached back and flicked the lock over on his door with a mild thrill.

“Not anymore,” Steve declared, moving to shed his jeans, while Nancy tossed both her bra and her dress onto the back of the couch. 

“You in?” she directed at Jonathan.

He looked back and forth between them, still dressed. Steve had no idea how he had the ability to be so cool about these sorts of things. Steve often felt like he was vibrating out of his skin with want, but Jonathan seemed to always be in perfect control of his desires. Sometimes in the middle of it, Jonathan’s fingers would dig into Nancy’s hips, grip her like she’d dissolve under a lighter pressure, kiss her like he’d lost all taste for air. But that was only in the middle, he was so fitted together at the beginning, master of his baser impulses.

Steve was in constant awe of him.

They hadn’t done anything all three of them in the same space since Billy had caught them. All of them had a certain nervous jitter about the concept, but Jonathan was the most reserved, retreating from them entirely if things got too heated between Steve and Nancy, and pumping the breaks if Nancy showed him interest around Steve.

Steve tried not to look at him with any sort of longing, he didn’t want him to leave but he also didn’t want to do anything that could be considered cajoling. Jonathan and Nancy shared the habit of digging in their heels hard if they felt they were being influenced somehow. All the same, he missed his presence in those moments.

Jonathan’s dark eyes wandered over Nancy and over Steve, and made their way behind Steve to double check the lock on the door, the curtains on the windows, the completeness of their privacy.

“I suppose I can keep an eye on the two of you.”

**Jonathan**

Steve’s place had become their base of operations, it was where they met and where they ate and occasionally where they all slept. The hours of summer that were too hot to face out of doors were spent laying on Steve’s floor. It had become a place of music and laughter and, in a way, a glimpse into a future where they were all together. Not always, but enough. 

When they’d moved Steve in, it had not been quite a month since Billy had burst their bubble of secrecy and things had felt strange directly after. Unsettled, insecure, sullied. Jonathan knew he’d been flinching, every time they all leaned in together he’d pulled back. This was not terribly surprising, it took him time to feel comfortable, and having that disrupted – it would take time to find it again. That was not the revelation. 

The revelation was that he had missed it.  

Jonathan missed the three of them all together, Steve’s hands on Nancy, the gleeful little noise she made when both of their mouths were on her skin, the awe all over Steve’s face whenever Jonathan resurfaced from Nancy and caught his eye. He missed the pictures he would have taken on a roll of film that needed to be developed privately. 

The night they’d moved him in, he’d watched them again in the cool light of Steve’s new bedroom, and it felt like coming home. The correctness of them together, all three of them together again, had permeated him entirely.

What they’d chosen was difficult, but they would always feel worth it. 

It had been two weeks since, and that particular afternoon Steve had come home from work and they were all together again, out behind his house. Jonathan had made a stir-fry that his mom had taught him how to cook. The plates were empty, sitting in the grass, and everyone sipped at the iced tea Nancy had been experimenting with since Steve finally got a jug in the house. 

“So what do you do at work, anyways?” Nancy asked. Which had been the predominant topic of conversation between Jonathan and Nancy before Steve had gotten home. He’d been there a while and they both still had no idea. 

“Wear a tie and wish for death, mostly,” Steve answered, though his focus was almost entirely on the thick blade of grass he was settling between his thumbs.

Jonathan snorted and shook his head. The backyard smelled warmly of sun baked grass. There was no fence, but fences were rarely popular in Hawkins, and the yards sprawled out behind the wide scattered houses unbroken. The three of them hid in the shadow of the house from the orangey glare of the sunset. The mosquitos were eager to get their own dinner started, and all three of them had to swat them away at least once. 

“Okay, but what do you do?” Jonathan pressed, curious as well. 

“Honestly, I have no idea. I photocopy the forms in my in box, and I fill out the copy with the file they’re paperclipped to, and then I put the filled out form in the file and the one I photo copied in a tray. And then I say to Gary, ‘Is it the 20th today?’ and he says, ‘All day,’ and I don’t throw myself out the window. The only time I actually know what I’m doing is lunch. Mostly I think I’m learning how to sleep with my eyes open.”

Jonathan shook his head again. “You’d snore.”

“I don’t snore,” Steve gasped.

“You absolutely do – how many times has your nose been broken? Of course you snore,” Nancy laughed.

Steve rebutted this point with a long, loud noise produced by blowing through the blade of grass. It sounded like a siren and a dying cat and a record scratch, and Jonathan could feel it in his molars and hear it echo in the yards over.

“Well said,” he noted, dryly opening one of the eyes he’d squeezed shut in the attack on his ears. 

Steve smiled, pleased with himself, and dropped the grass to stand up on the cement steps that led to the back door. 

“C’mon, I want to show you guys something before we get eaten alive,” he said, picking up his own cup and plate. Jonathan smacked another mosquito, leaving a bloody smudge on his arm, and followed after Steve with Nancy. 

The kitchen was still warm from cooking, but they ditched the plates in the sink and wandered out to where the ceiling fans made it bearable. All the windows spread open to their screens, making the air in the house feel light and wide with movement. 

Steve lead them back to his bedroom where a box fan was used to fight back the heat, and pointed them both towards his dresser before he sat down on the edge of his bed. 

“Those two top drawers are yours. I have more than enough room in the closet, and I thought it would be nice if you guys could keep some stuff here - stay over more,” Steve said, talking to the drawers, looking at them both in glances. “I know you guys can’t stay all of the time, I know that Nancy’s mom would probably break down the door if you did. And you want to be home for your mom and Will, Jon… But I thought it would still be nice if you guys had stuff here, toothbrushes and a hair tie or something, I don’t know. I just wanted you to feel like this is your place, too.”  

Both Nancy and Jonathan stood in front of the drawers for a while, not having expected that particular thing. The black lacquered wood with its sleek silver handles very much suited Steve, but the two tops ones suddenly belonged to them. It was not a key or a promise ring or anything that put a demand on them to keep something; it was an offer of respite, a place to put things, a place to be. 

Steve was trying so hard to be casual and Nancy turned to him first, wrapping her arms around his neck and flattening him to the mattress with kisses. Jonathan turned around, leaning against the dresser, watching them both with such fondness bloomed inside of him. It was a warmth that made a home behind his ribs. 

This thing was working, _they_ were working.

What a strange and wonderful reality. 

“Thank you, really,” Jonathan said when Nancy was through thanking him in a thousand little pecks. He wasn’t sure what he would put in the drawer, he didn’t like to stay far from home for very long, he knew it made his mom nervous and he liked to know where Will was, but the gesture of it was welcome. 

Steve smiled and shrugged his shoulders like it was nothing at all.

“Is this a bribe so I’ll keep cooking?” Jonathan teased so that the vulnerability of the moment didn’t swallow them all up. 

“Maybe,” Steve answered with a laugh. “Is it working?” 

Jonathan shrugged, he could see the smile he was wearing in the faces across from him. “Maybe.” 

**Billy**

“I’m getting echoes of New Years,” Billy stated, hands in his pockets, shades on, every inch of him the image of casual. The image he’d curated was that he’d merely been in the neighbourhood. Nevermind that he’d been waiting to pounce on Steve after work for the last hour or so. 

His father sure did like to keep him late.

Steve looked up from his mailbox, perplexed and at least mildly startled by Billy’s appearance, like he forgot they lived in the same town. It certainly felt that way.

“What? Hi Billy, it’s nice to see you too,” Steve laughed collecting nothing from the box, leaning against it. He was dressed like he’d been ravished on the way to church, his button down open at the collar, untucked and rolled at the sleeves. His tie and jacket were probably on his front seat, that’s where he seemed to leave them regularly – not that Billy had been checking up on him regularly. Just that every time he did pass by, that’s where they were.  

“Is it?” Billy cocked an eyebrow over the frames of his sunglasses. Steve had been busy with moving and busy with starting work and busy with Nancy and Jonathan all the damn time like they were a set of Siamese triplets. He didn’t know how more people hadn’t figured it out or caught them at some sort of mischief with the way they seemed to hang off each other perpetually. It was nauseating. 

Billy hadn’t been pacing the floor, whiling away the hours plucking the petals off of daisies, he had a job of his own, he was out of the house more often than not. Still, certain needs had been neglected. Left unaccounted for in the shuffle of Steve’s life to a new chapter.

“Yeah?” Steve answered, squinting at him a little, the sun behind Billy’s head, low in the sky but still hot. Cicadas sang their little song. “Things have been really hectic. You should come in! I’ll give you the tour – you haven’t seen the house yet, right?”

“Not the inside of it,” Billy answered, following after Steve as he waved him towards the front steps.

Steve opened the door for him, and Billy stepped into the house. He slipped his sunglasses off, looking around. “So this is all yours?” he asked curiously.

“Yeah. I mean, the furniture will probably stay when I leave as my parents furnished it for a renter, but – yeah, I live here,” Steve explained, patting the back of the couch like it was a wild mustang, the sort of thing you could never truly own.

“Your parents bought you a house?” Billy asked, incredulity dripping from the statement.

“Technically when they bought the house it wasn’t for me,” Steve answered and carried on a tangent about rental properties and his mother’s real estate business.

It somehow escaped the notice of rich people that they were rich, and so his explanation was given as though this cleared everything up. That it was perfectly normal and reasonable that he was moving out of his parent’s place into his own place before he’d turned nineteen. 

“Do they know it’s a flop pad for your long list of conquests?” Billy asked, approaching the bookshelf to skim the titles, letting his fingers drag across the smooth, uncracked spines. He’d never been in Steve’s bedroom at his parents’ place.

“I don’t think three counts as a particularly long list.”

Billy shook his head, trying to get that thought out of his mind. Three of them. He did not want to be lumped in with whatever hippy lovefest they had going on. If anything, Steve was his conquest. “Spoken like a true slut,” he huffed, looking up at Steve.

“Don’t harass the tour guides,” Steve answered, coming up beside him. Up close he smelled warm, overheated but clean, that cologne he wore a lesser note from being worn all day in the heat. It was very white collar suburban of him, he didn’t smell like sunscreen because he’d been in an office all day, only really sweating because he’d been in a suit in August. The cotton of his shirt not damp, but softened on the skin beneath it. Touchable in the way he’d disassembled the suit and slouched his shoulders, hands in his pockets. Off the clock. Billy’s teeth ached to finish the job, bear the skin that was still covered.

“Tour guide’s askin’ for it,” Billy dismissed. “Not being a very good tour guide. Makes me wonder what he is good at.”

Steve chuckled and looked at the bookshelf with the same sort of curiosity Billy did, like he’d never seen the books there before. Billy wondered if he’d read any of them.

“Well,” Steve turned around towards the dining room table, surrounded by high back chairs and holding a variety of things that were probably not supposed to be there. Mugs that had not made it to the kitchen, a sweatshirt despite the fact it had been 90 degrees every day, a stack of D&D books that probably belonged to the kids. The idea that Max had been in this house before Billy certainly didn’t sit well, but he said nothing. “This is the dining room. I don’t dine in here, but the table makes a really good shelf – lots of surface area.”

Steve gestured back to the couch and the chairs that were nestled closer to the front door by an empty fireplace. “And that’s the living room, where I do dine, usually out of a take out container. You can tell by the various shades of brown that I picked none of this.”

The tour carried on like that, his yellow kitchen and the green bathroom, the backyard that was mostly just browning grass.

His bedroom was of interest, the ceiling was an angled skylight, frosted and letting the light of dusk filter through, and the far wall was entirely mirrored. They were the folding doors of a closet, but where they were mounted didn’t change the fact that they were floor to ceiling mirrors.

“Now that’s some beautiful narcissism.” He stopped in the doorway, the smell of Nancy’s perfume in the room keeping him out like a ward. It wasn’t really his concern what Steve did with himself and whatever assortment of people he chose to ‘date,’ but the idea of them was so much more tangible in there. The image of July was painted on the back of his mind.

“Yeah, I knew you’d like that,” Steve grinned, though confusion crossed his features at the space that had grown between them. “You’re allowed in, you know.”

“Oh, am I? How kind of you.” Billy shifted his position from one side of the doorframe to the other, he fit the edge of it between his shoulder blades and his arms crossed over his chest. He watched Steve and did not just undress him in his eyes, but pressed him to his mirror image and gave him a front row seat to watching himself fall apart with his gaze.

“Happy now?”

“You’re kidding me, right? Billy Hargrove is in my room – I’m beside myself,” Steve teased, his mouth curved playfully, his eyes strangely earnest.

Billy eyed the mirror as Steve got closer. “Behind yourself,” he corrected.

Steve laughed like a little huff, just a breath, a flirt.

Billy wanted to press his fingers into his mouth.

He let him get so close, the charge of their bodies coming closer, feeling like a touch, a precognition of a connection. At the last second he leaned into the collision and reached Steve first, took hold of him by a handful of his collar and pushed him down onto the bed. There was something both typical and novel about pressing Steve down into his unmade sheets.

It was sort of funny, the image they made. Hawkins’ precious pretty boy pinned beneath their new bad boy king. 

Billy’s fingers worked away at the buttons of Steve’s shirt and his mouth pressed beneath his collarbone, all teeth and tongue. Steve made such a beautiful uninhibited noise when he’d hardly even begun to touch him. It was the sort of sound that claimed a space, and Billy was immediately enamored with the privacy of the house.

And then...

“Wait,” Steve breathed, and Billy grudgingly obliged, albeit unhelpfully. He paused over Steve and letting him navigate his own way out from beneath him.

Once he’d slipped out with ruffled hair and disappeared out the bedroom door, Billy breathed out a sigh and sat properly on the bed. The smell of Nancy’s perfume still lingered, something floral was in the laundry pile on the floor, and two mixed tapes sat on the dresser labelled with Jonathan’s serial killer scrawl.  

His skin felt overheated, a dull throbbing settled in behind his temples.

Steve came back to him looking more or less exactly the same and settled on the bed like a slinky in human form. His limbs assorted themselves into a cross-legged position somehow and he held out a small square package. “Here.”

Billy took it in a reflex, and felt the throbbing in his temples turn sharp. He pressed his thumb into the plastic packaging and felt the lubricated latex shift inside.

“What the fuck?” he asked as politely as those words could be uttered.

“It’s a condom,” Steve provided helpfully.

“I know what it is, Steve – why is it in my hand?”

There was a sharp edge to his voice, and though he could tell it would cut he used it anyways. If it was a joke, Billy wasn’t laughing.

Steve’s words got vague, his shoulders curved uncomfortably, and his hands moved to communicate for the words that wouldn’t come.

Billy didn’t know why he should be uncomfortable, he wasn’t the one being accused of being somehow infectious.

“Do you think I’m going to give you the gay plague?”

Steve’s eyes went wide, his words fumbled out of him worse than ever. “What? No! No, Nancy and Jon – ”

“So  _they_ think I’m going to give you the gay plague?” Billy cut over him. There was such a ringing in his ears.

“No!” Steve insisted.

“Then why am I holding this, Steve?” His voice was getting louder.

The louder you are, the more right you are. He learned that from his father. 

Billy thought of California and saw the sorts of places a boy his age shouldn’t have been, overgrown parts of parks and gas station bathrooms. Careful or not, he knew it was stupid and he did it anyways. He could hear his father talking over the news that the queers deserved what they got – and he could see the way he’d met his eyes when he said it. He could feel hot water scalding his shoulders, and cold water trying to cool off that fucking need, but nothing worked like the thrill and the danger and the reality of it did. 

He didn’t have to remember that twisted up feeling inside of him like he was some kind of time bomb, he was living it.

“It’s just a condom,” Steve implored, his voice sounded far away but he reached out to touch Billy, possibly to take the offending object away, but Billy’s hand jerked away from the touch like it burned.

“I don’t need this shit,” Billy growled, and maybe he meant the condom, or the confrontation, or Steve. He didn’t know what he meant just then, just that he had to get out.

He tossed the square down on the bed between them. “Keep it for your girlfriend - or don’t! Knock her up, you two deserve each other.” 

“Billy,” Steve said it like a plea, but Billy got up anyway.  

He left anyway. 

**Nancy**

Steve sat at the edge of a large rock, his legs dangling down far enough to just skim the top of the water. Nancy sat down next to him, her own legs did not reach so far, but the little droplets of water that eased down her legs would drip from her toes and make up the distance.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked, because he looked like he was about to implode and it was the last week of summer. She would be going back to school with Jonathan soon, and the weather was obscenely beautiful, and Steve had folded himself up in his own head. 

“Talk about what?” Steve said, feigning perplexed. 

Nancy wanted to reach out and pinch him, instead she covered his hand with hers. She didn’t say anything. She was learning from Jonathan that sometimes silence was the best tool to get someone else to talk.

“You don’t wanna talk about it,” Steve said finally. 

“Glad you know what I want, takes a lot of weight off my shoulders,” Nancy retorted, not yet a master of silence. She pushed her lips together in a smile and nudged his shoulder a little with her own. 

“It’s Billy related,” Steve spoke his name like he was holding explosives, or perhaps that’s just how she heard it. 

“It’s also you related,” Nancy pointed out, which was true. It did not change the fact that the idea of Billy made her hands clench into fists, but she could clench her fists and listen. One did not obstruct the other entirely. 

Steve smiled a little, but he didn’t look at her. He looked across the water, and then he looked back at the place that Jonathan had ensconced himself in the low branches of a willow tree, reading. They both spent some time watching him, entirely absorbed in it, he flipped the pages like he might miss something. 

They’d come down to the quarry to be together, and they were, even if Steve hadn’t been in the water yet and Jonathan had not even bothered to bring swimming trunks. They spent a lot of time together like that since Steve got his place. All of them together by proximity, doing their own individual things, bumping into each other and calling out to each other and reengaging at sporadic times.

Steve opened his mouth and closed it again, shook his head. “I pissed him off.” 

Nancy resisted the urge to point out Billy was always pissed off, it seemed to be his default setting. She also resisted the urge to ask if Billy had done something to him because Steve had pissed him off. She kept faith that he would tell her if that were the case, that she wouldn’t have to pull it out of him like a sliver. 

There was also the fact that Billy’s actions were not known for their subtlety. If he had done something to Steve, she would be able to read it on his skin, but he was markless, and had been markless all of August at least.

“I just haven’t heard from him in a while is all,” he carried on, pulling at the weeds that grew up alongside the rock distractedly.  

Ah. That explained the absence of marks. 

Nancy tried her best not to be pleased and instead focused on the small crease between Steve’s eyebrows, the evidence that it bothered him. He was bothered, and so she was not pleased, and she squeezed his hand gently. 

“I think it would be better if we didn’t talk about it,” Steve said finally. 

“Talk about what?” Jonathan asked, finished his book and joining them on the rock. He crossed his legs as he sat so as not to dangle his shoes close to the water. 

“Billy,” Nancy and Steve answered in unison. 

Jonathan hummed in a way that agreed with the previous statement and they all fell into a comfortable quiet. The water smacked ever so gently at the rock, the sun dusted the surface in flash bright sparkles. Nancy fit her other hand into Jonathan’s.

“Are you going to be glad to get your whole bed back?” Nancy asked, changing the subject. They’d been staying with Steve at least three nights a week. If Nancy had her way, it would have been much more, but it had been a tricky balancing act to keep her mother from deeming it excessive and banning it all together. 

Steve laughed. “No. I got you drawers so you would stay, not leave me for education, I’m feeling very betrayed right about now.” 

“I told you the drawers were a bribe,” Jonathan teased. 

“You’ll still have us on the weekends,” Nancy promised. 

“Thank god for that,” Steve sighed. 

They fell back into quiet for some time, the quarry was strangely empty for the summer. Not that it usually bustled with activity, but in the late summer it was used for bonfires and underage drinking and sucking the marrow of summer dry. No one else was there though, it was just them in that big scar in the earth, held close by the sheer mountainous walls of the quarry. The seclusion of it begged to be taken advantage of. 

Summer was winding to a close but that only meant they had to make the most of the moments they had remaining. There would only be so many of them. 

“You know what I’ve never done? ” Nancy asked suddenly, pushing herself up to her feet. “Skinny dipped. Anyone else?” she put her hands on her hips to look at both her boys.

Jonathan, wearing a bemused expression, raised his hand tentatively.

Both of them looked at Steve, who shrugged. “I did it with Tommy and Carol, but that was in my pool. Why? Are we doing it now?” 

“I am,” Nancy chirped and began to peel the lavender bathing suit from her frame. 

“What?” Jonathan asked, looking around like he was going to point out that the sun was still out, but Nancy was already kicking the garment off of her ankle and diving into the water. There was very little difference in the sensation of swimming naked, but her heart still beat fast, thrilled by the frivolity of it - the gall of it. It felt so typical and teenaged. 

Steve followed her. She felt him disrupt the water before she resurfaced. She was surprised when she blinked herself back into the sunlight to see that Jonathan was shedding his jeans. He spared a moment to tuck his book away to safety before joining Steve and Nancy in the greenish water with a tremendous splash. 

Nancy laughed and splashed him in return as he came up for breath. 

There was, of course, a great deal of splashing and of shrieking laughter that echoed across the rock face of the quarry. They dove deep and tugged at each other’s ankles and got lost in playing in the summer sun until all their fingers had pruned and they’d kissed one another so much that all their mouths had the metallic tang of freshwater at the backs of their tongues.

Jonathan showed them how to do a somersault, and Steve spit a fountain of water at Nancy while she wasn’t paying attention because she’d been giving herself a moustache with her own soaked hair. Everything they did they could have done in their swimsuits but didn’t, and it somehow felt like they’d invented fun because of it. They sucked the marrow out of summer. 

Eventually they made their way back onto dry land, the daytime skinny dipping was not quite so stress inducing as the paranoid time of dressing afterwards. At least in the water they were all just the vague idea of naked portrayed mostly in bare shoulders and hazy paleness below the surface. Their clothes fought them to be pulled back onto wet skin, but soon enough they were ready to go. 

As they climbed the hill Nancy paused for Steve who lagged behind, that little crease had found its way back between his brows. 

“Give him time, and space,” she said, and he looked up at her a little startled, like he’d been caught with something he shouldn’t have. Nancy reached out, squeezing his cheeks playfully with one hand. 

“He’ll miss this face, you’ll see. Just wait him out,” she promised. 

Steve smiled and she took his hand so they could both catch up with Jonathan.


	9. September 1985

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back to school time and everyone is struggling and trying to find the joy anyways. Except Billy who is struggling and trying to make other people miserable - which is sort of his version.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So we are now 1/4 of the way through! Isn't that nuts? I think so!  
> Warning for Billy being back to his usual shit plus a little extra. Internalized homophobia becomes externalized homophobia.

**Billy**

The funny thing was, Billy didn’t think about telling all of Hawkins about the three sexual delinquents they held in their midst after he’d been to Steve’s house for what he assumed to be the first and last time.

It would have served them all right, but he didn’t think about it.

When you have one card, you really want to play it on something good. When he was a kid, he used to sit with the other boys from his neighbourhood and burn down matchsticks until they scorched his fingers. It was a childhood betting game. First to let go lost. Billy was the reigning champ, it had made him a lot of quarters and then everyone knew better than to challenge him on it. He still had the scars on his thumb and forefinger. He still had that mentality; don’t let go if you can get something out of it.

Besides, he could manage petty revenge in about a thousand different ways without resorting to that.

Billy would be spending five out of the seven days of the week in the same building with two out of the three. They apparently thought Steve needed protection, and he thought they should probably start worrying about themselves.

Especially because Hawkins was a small town and small town people talked. Talked about how Nancy drove in with Jonathan that morning and how so far as anyone could tell she’d spent the whole summer between him and Steve. Whether that was sandwiched between or ferried back and forth like the child of a civil divorce was up to the creativity of the speaker at the time. Billy hadn’t said anything, but they’d done very little to keep themselves hidden besides starting to close the curtains.

This put into conflict two concepts Billy held near and dear: keeping his leverage, and watching those who crossed him burn.

He rubbed the smooth burn scars into one another absently. Don’t let go if you can get something out of it.

It didn’t take much. A derisive snort and, “You think Nancy Wheeler is getting up to that shit? She’d have to take the stick out of her ass before you could get anything else inside her,” did the trick.

The boys laughed, the girls made delighted little titters, and just like that he was their secret keeper. Whatever the king said was gospel, and it was good to be king. 

_You’re fucking welcome._

Of course he wasn’t doing it out of the goodness of his heart, so he perked up like a dog eager to chase the tires of a car when they passed him in the hall. He was still surrounded by the gibbering gaggle he’d accumulated.

“Hey Nance, settle a bet – are you medically frigid or is it a religious thing?” Billy called and they met each other’s gaze with the strange fission of mutual dislike and a sort of twisted honour tying their tongues. The game had rules, things that were out of bounds, but it didn’t mean he didn’t want to play.

She stopped walking even though Jonathan carried on for another two steps, hoping to just brush by and carry on with his day. She was the more reactive out of the two of them. Possibly the three of them. Steve had tried to play nice as much as he could manage. Billy remembered her in February, staring straight into his face. He knew guys that didn’t dare, but Nancy seemed to be an iron spine wrapped in a puppy sweater.

“Are you medically obnoxious or is it a religious thing?” she offered back. It wasn’t exactly a masterpiece but the guys around Billy all chorused ‘ooooh’ like a live studio audience.

They were not on her side but they were not truly on his side, either. Billy didn’t mind that, he’d always been his own side. 

“Aw, sweetheart, don’t be like that, I could straighten you out,” he purred, grinning a Cheshire cat’s grin as he pushed himself off the lockers to get closer, to press his luck. He wanted to see her explode. He wanted everyone to see her explode.

“Leave her alone, Billy,” Jonathan warned and Billy’s attention turned a little feral, a little wild as it shifted onto Jonathan. He was the quiet, inert one, but Billy could make his own fun if he had to. He’d been an only child before Max.

“I could straighten you out too if you wanted, queerbait,” Billy threatened, a different edge to his voice as he stepped up towards Jonathan. The group he’d been with closed in like a wall behind him. The tension of a fight began to condense the air around them. Jonathan’s eyebrows arched up in a way that called him a pot and pointed out their shared hue, but he did not move an inch.

Quiet. Inert. Billy wondered if he’d be quite so stoic after he’d swallowed some teeth.

It was Nancy who stepped in between them, once again staring directly into Billy’s face. “You’re a fucking cliché – you know that?” she hissed and turned to take Jonathan’s hand, tugging him away from the throng of people.

 "Oh that’s right, let your girlfriend take care of it for you. Guess we know who wears the pants, faggot. If you ever see your balls again, Byers, you let me know. We’ll settle this,” Billy called after them and the gaggle of seniors that was not so very different from a mob laughed and tossed out their own jibes and jeers. Their laughter seemed to come from the walls themselves, echoing and becoming an entity that chased the two retreating figures down the hall. 

Point one: Billy.

Senior year wouldn’t be so bad.

**Jonathan**

High School sucked. As Jane Austen would have put it – it was a truth universally acknowledged.

Billy was not improving it any, but in Jonathan’s humble opinion it would have sucked with or without him. He generally prepared for the worst and so it was hard to spook or sour him away from things. There was a certain practicality to his pessimism. 

However, he was in Jonathan’s English class for the second year in a row, because of course he was. The incident in the hallway on the first day had been a kind of official announcement of a larger pattern of harassment, so when Jonathan took up his typical seat at the back of the room, Billy chose the one next to him. Jonathan had considered moving to the front instead, but he liked his place at the back and detested the idea of giving Billy any sort of satisfaction.

The English room was a configuration of desks that put everyone in pairs so Billy was entirely too close to him. He behaved like a liquid, pouring into the seat and spreading to take up the space of this new container. He leaned an arm on the back of his chair and grinned at him. “Hey there, neighbour.”

The one saving grace was that the rest of the seniors who had been blessed with the mantel of popularity and orbited Billy like the sun were not in the AP English class, so he did not find himself surrounded by cronies, just people who would rather stay out of it for their own sake. There was a certain curiosity as to what Billy was doing in AP English class – but Jonathan didn’t voice it. That could be considered inviting a conversation, which he was not keen to do. 

Billy, however, was exceedingly good at getting what he wanted, which was Jonathan’s attention, if not a rise. He leaned into his space until the proximity had that itching sensation of a near touch, their electrons bashing up against each other on an atomic scale. The cigarette smell of him reminded Jonathan of his father, which was never a pleasant association. 

“Do you mind?” Jonathan finally relented, though he kept his voice even, bored. He kept the bite of annoyance gnawing at the back of his throat to himself. 

“Do you always let your girlfriend settle your battles for you?” Billy asked.

“That was her battle. Do you always pick fights with girls?”

Billy smirked. “Apparently.”

Jonathan rolled his eyes and leaned towards the far side of his desk. He wouldn’t move the chair, that would be admitting defeat. “Hilarious.”

“No, what’s hilarious is what I’m going to do to your locker,” Billy said, tapping his pen restlessly against the cover of Pride and Prejudice that had been laid out on everyone’s desktop. He tapped nib end down, and soft blue smudges pressed on to the surface every time. Jonathan did his best not to watch this like he was committing an atrocity. “But I guess you’ll just have to wait and see.” 

The next day he found out that the hilarious thing Billy was going to do to his locker was tape what appeared to be an entire box worth of still-wrapped condoms to its surface. The word “HOMO” was scrawled between them in black marker. Jonathan was pulled out of class by the Principal, as it was his locker, and it was demanded that he explain himself and clean it up, which he did find sort of funny in the exhausting way society loved to blame the victim.

“Yes, I was clearly going for a Public Health and Safety PSA sort of thing. I’ll remember to run it by your office in the future,” Jonathan said, his hands in his pockets, his face red and the back of his neck hot. 

“Don’t get smart with me,” the Principal sniped, his arms crossed and his moustache fully unamused. 

“Right, we don’t encourage that here,” Jonathan carried on, unable to stop himself. He’d definitely liked it better when school had sucked quietly. “I’ll clean it up.”

“This is serious. People will have concerns about safety.” 

The way he said it made it obvious that the concerns did not have to do with Jonathan’s safety. 

“This is a bunch of condoms taped to a locker, it’s pretty much as un-serious as you can get without balloon animals involved. I didn’t do it, but I’ll clean it up – can I get to it?” 

Jonathan didn’t tell him Billy did it because it wasn’t worth it. Billy might get told not to let boyish pranks get out of hand or some other slap on the wrist, but nothing would be done about him. He let the man have his catastrophizing moment, threaten to expel him, and inform him that he invited these sorts of things with how differently he behaved. Jonathan washed the marker away with rubbing alcohol and wished vaguely that he’d disappear if he scrubbed hard enough too. 

Back in English that afternoon he watched Billy swagger in and felt the warm familiarity of deep rooted dislike. It gripped his lungs, and his fingers wrapped white knuckle tight around his pen. People in the class had been glancing at him, it passed around like a virus. He wondered if Billy had some greater intention, some long game he was playing. Maybe he hoped that Nancy and Jonathan would pass these things along to Steve. Maybe this was just him taking advantage of any ounce of power he might have the opportunity to grasp. 

Billy settled in next to him with a grin. “Hilarious, right?”

Jonathan shrugged and turned his gaze over to Billy with a cold detachment. “I mean, if you really think that’s hilarious I’d hate to be you before you go to sleep at night.” 

And it did strike him as sad, but he just did not have the energy to put any sympathy towards a mildly charming sadist who spent most of his time actively trying to wreak havoc. Compassion only went so far. Jonathan hoped Billy’s self loathing kept him up at night, it was the least of the cruelties he hoped for him

Billy’s grin did not disappear but it did slip, his laugh was a little hollow yet still darkly amused. “You think a lot about me laying in bed?” 

Jonathan snorted and shook his head, putting his gaze back up to the front of the room. Billy needed attention the way plants craved the sun, it sustained him. Jonathan could freeze someone out with the best of them. 

He could starve him out. Hell, he could make it through one last year on spite alone. 

**Nancy**

Their first full week had been hard, but it had been fairly easy to get into the dark room after hours; a little tape on the latch of the door, and voila! To be fair, teachers weren’t generally on the look out for students itching to be in the school after hours, secretly working in the spaces after the bell sounded, so it wasn’t exactly a challenging act of breaking and entering.

It did occur to Nancy she was collecting a series of very unsavory skills and Jonathan smiled at her like he’d noticed as well.

“You’re welcome,” she chirped with a lesser amount of sass as she gestured him into the door and peeled away the tape so they’d have privacy in the dim red light.

Jonathan dug into his bag to find the roll of film stashed at the bottom, private and stowed away like a secret for this moment. Nancy felt the same tingling excitement she had during their skinny dipping session over the summer. The content of the roll was very similar as well, great swaths of skin, thrilling in the way that you’d never want someone to happen upon them, even though it was largely inexplicit. Kissing mouths, bras and panties, and hands slipped playfully and adventurously under the tights waists of jeans.

Nancy couldn’t help but smile while she watched him, reminded of the first time she’d hovered over his shoulder while he worked the magic of the trays and solutions and the light trapped in paper that made photographs. He was comfortable in the dark room, and it was impossible not to notice. Jonathan seemed largely uncomfortable nearly everywhere else, so the confidence of that bastion that straightened his back was clear. He moved determinedly, and Nancy tucked herself up onto a nearby surface to watch him.

The last time they’d been in here together, they’d been looking for clues in Barb’s disappearance. It was hard to believe the calendar had wrapped itself nearly all the way around twice since then. So much was different. The moments she forgot to be torn apart in grief for her best friend were no longer respite or a biting disappointment in herself, they were largely the norm, but November was coming up fast.

It was stranger still to think about her in this place where the memories were already past tense. She’d already been missing, already been gone when Jonathan and Nancy had stood in the dark room trying to catch a glimpse of something awful. Nancy had just started her senior year, she would be graduating that year and there were so many memories all over the school where Barb had been living and vibrant, and now there were going to be so many more where she wasn’t.

The effervescent feeling of excitement melted into the pins and needles of anxiety in her palms.

“Are you excited to see how they turned out?” Nancy asked as Jonathan fiddled with the enlarger. She spoke to pull herself out of the lonely dark place she was disappearing into, reaching out for Jonathan to pull her out. He would have understood if she put it like that, but she didn’t want to ask that of him, and she _was_ excited to see the pictures, to see the way Jonathan saw her and Steve.

“Completely ambivalent,” he murmured, his focus on the settings of the machine, though a smile cracked his features and he turned it towards her when he’d adjusted them to his liking. “Yes, I’m excited,” he said, not that committed to his dry rebuttal. “Are you excited? Since you had a say in these ones?”

Nancy smiled back fondly, warmly, a little sad that they were both ruining their good time with bad memories. “I’m so excited,” she assured, unfolding herself from the table top to go over to him.

She wrapped her arms around him and buried her face between the wings of his shoulder blades. She breathed in the smell of him, the smell of whatever laundry detergent Joyce bought on sale and the smell of his house and his deodorant.

“One day, we’re going to all live together and I’m going to hang them up on the walls,” she told the worn material of his t-shirt and the easy rhythm of his breathing.

He laughed, and she smiled, resting her cheek against his back, feeling the reverberation of his amusement along his spine. 

“These aren’t the kind of pictures you frame, Nance,” Jonathan chuckled.

“Not with that attitude, anyways,” she unwound herself from his back so he could set up the photo paper.

Nancy eased back enough to watch him but not crowd him, curious but not underfoot. Though she could not help but close in when he was transferring the seemingly blank sheet, imbued with secret images from the enlarger, over to the developer bath. That was her favourite part, watching the images appear. She pushed herself up onto her tiptoes, tucking her chin onto his shoulder to get a clear view. 

“I think about that sometimes,” Jonathan said while the shadows began to form and configure into the shapes of the photo.

“About frames?” Nancy asked.

“Us,” he said, his tone including Steve, who kissed Nancy in the pale image coming into sharper relief under his watchful eye. “Living together, putting pictures up on walls.”

He said it and she was filled up with such a beautiful longing for the promise of that future, the one where they would live somewhere, all together. They’d get to argue over the sorts of things that make appropriate wall art, and fill albums with pictures, and fall asleep on the couch like a pile of puppies. The shadows of the past did what shadows do when introduced to a bright light, they became smaller but also deeper – pitfalls for later, though easily avoidable for the moment.

“It’d have to be after university, and probably somewhere other than Hawkins. And obviously a lot can change between then and now – and it’s so typical to think we’ll last forever in high school – but it’s a nice thought, isn’t it?” Jonathan carried on.

“The nicest,” Nancy pressed her smile against his shoulder so he could feel it, before stepping back from him so he could freely move the image into the next tray when it was time.

She didn’t say anything else about it, an almost superstitious notion that if she spoke the desire aloud it would jinx it. Instead, when Jonathan finally dropped the photo into the water bath that she knew was the final step, she leaned up and kissed him. It developed like a photo, the soft, barely there notion of a touch that eased into being, deepened and became clearer in a matter of moments.

The week had felt about a month long, Billy had been awful and they got to see Steve so much less already, but Jonathan was a pessimist who thought about a future with all of them together some place. He allowed her to distract him away from his meticulous process.

With her fingers on the line of his jaw, she guided them both to that little edge of tabletop she’d sat herself on when they first came in, returning to it without breaking the contact of their lips.  He fit himself between her knees, and with her arms around his shoulders she shifted forward, pinning their hips together. All the fond warmth that had filled her chest grew in intensity and snaked lower.

Jonathan’s hand rested against her thigh a moment, skin to skin beneath the hem of her skirt. She could feel the callous between his thumb and forefinger, the rough skin at his fingertips where he chewed his nails when stressed. It was not a push further, but a pause, a request for her full attention when she had a moment. Nancy eased back to look at him, her fingers stroking through the strands of his hair that touched the back of his neck.

“Should I grab a condom?” he asked like he was trying not to be presumptuous. It was sweet of him, considerate, but it made Nancy giggle.

“Do you keep condoms in the dark room?” she asked, finding it a little absurd – the here and the now of it all.

“Billy taped a bunch to my locker,” Jonathan stated like she would have somehow been left out of the loop on that particular episode in the dramatic saga.

“You kept them?” Nancy asked, a little incredulous; who knew what he’d done with them.

Jonathan shrugged. “They’re perfectly good, still sealed and in date… Besides, I sort of enjoy the idea that my sex life is being facilitated on his dime.”

Nancy laughed and kissed him again. “You’re a spite genius.”

“I do what I can.” 

**Steve**

With Nancy and Jonathan back to school, there was very little difference in his own week. There was just the strange knowledge that when he glanced at his watch in the early afternoon that his house was empty. They weren’t tangled together in his sheets asleep or being sweet or getting up to some sort of mischief. They weren’t messing around in his kitchen or attempting to figure out the lawn mower they’d found in the garage. Nancy wasn’t braless in one of his t-shirts and Jonathan wasn’t reading his books. They were at school, and his house was occupied only by the things in it, and would be until he came home to keep them company.

If he called, no one would answer.

Billy was also back at school, Steve had to assume.

He hadn’t seen him. It was a small town and a specific car and a remarkable presence, but somehow it was like they had slipped neatly into different dimensions. Steve didn’t like to think about that for too long because it made him worry in a way that spread to fill a space. An empty house worth of worry was too much for one person.

One would think that because he’d involved himself with three people, the threat of losing one would have no grip. That Billy cutting ties would hold less sting with Nancy and Jonathan behind him, but it hit him so hard his ears rang. He did his best to put it out of his mind. 

He missed the smell of chlorine and sunscreen, and the people he liked being in reach at some point throughout the day. He missed summer the moment it came to an end.

Two nights that week he’d dreamt of work, and that felt about as unfair as anything could possibly be. He was there all day, and revisiting the ‘battleship grey’ walls at night was almost more than he could bear.  

Work hadn’t been bad. Nothing had happened.

That was exactly the problem – _nothing had happened._ Steve couldn’t fathom that this was all there was, or how what he was doing translated into a paycheque. His mind ate itself and he could only make so many pencil and paperclip crossbows before he wanted to climb out the window and make a break for it.

His coworkers were an alright bunch of guys, even if they only laughed at his jokes because he was the boss’ son and spoke a language he didn’t understand. The language of his father. Dividends, profit margins, boil the ocean they said, run it up the flagpole.

It felt a lot like standing with Tommy H. and the other people who had made him feel both endlessly important and entirely disposable. He felt like a balloon full to bursting with absolutely nothing.

Sometimes he’d see his dad, usually in a company meeting about intangible things. Steve would have to dig a ball point pen into his palm to keep his mind in the room, trapped with the rest of him. Though mostly he just thought about the blue smudge that would be there when the meeting was over.

As they wrapped up, his dad would speak to him. Proximity and requirement. “They working you hard down there?” he’d ask.

“Yeah,” Steve would answer, even though he had no idea what he was working hard at. Or whether or not it was ever supposed to be so hard. His hand closed around the ink smudge he’d used to keep himself in his seat.

“Pay your dues and you’ll be upstairs with the big dogs in no time.”

Steve didn’t want to get upstairs with the big dogs, he wanted to go home, but his house was empty.

He’d go back to his desk and look at the ink blue flower that bloomed on his palm and think of blue flowers on a yellow sundress, glimpses of blue veins under pale skin, the near black blue of the Camaro. Steve would think himself somewhere else and, by only the grace of time’s persistent slog forward, he’d get to go home.

It was a Thursday when he pulled into his driveway and saw the lights were on. The evening was a soft shade of blue, like the ink mostly scrubbed away on his palm, the lights through his sheer curtains were a spot of gold. The contrast looked nice. Steve’s mind, still numb from the day, did not immediately sort out what was happening.

It wasn’t until Nancy stepped out on the front step that he realized they had let themselves in with his spare key, that his house was occupied by more than just his things and the warm light of the living room. He didn’t stop to think about when the sight of Nancy insinuated Jonathan, when they had truly become a ‘they’ in his mind, permanently linked. Joy filled him so quickly it was like he’d never been empty.

“Welcome home!” Nancy called from the steps, and Steve nearly bowled her over gathering her up into his arms like she might vanish if he didn’t lay hands on her immediately. He lifted her up off her feet and buried his face in her hair while she laughed. He practically carried her over the threshold like a precious treasure he wanted to hoard.

Inside he found Jonathan laying out paper-wrapped burgers and cardboard containers of fries on the coffee table, because they never bothered with the gigantic dining room table. Steve climbed over the back of the couch to catch him up too. He grabbed him around the middle and spun, and Jonathan very kindly allowed it to happen, even if he was rigid until his feet were back under him, laughing out, “Good to see you too.”

“And you brought me food, you beautiful people!” Steve said, gesturing to the greasy paper bag and spread of fast food with great delight.

“We didn’t have time to cook.” Jonathan said like an apology, but Steve cupped his face, leaning into him like he was about to kiss him, and repeated, “Beautiful people,” while Jonathan leaned back and laughed before he released him.

“I could get used to being greeted by this level of enthusiasm,” Nancy giggled, climbing over the arm of the couch and settling herself into the corner that had become her spot.

Steve took the spot beside Nancy, and Jonathan sat down on his other side so that he was bookended in by the two of them. He put a lukewarm and over-salted french fry into his mouth. It tasted like happiness. Or the moment did, anyways. “Get used to it. I spend my days with so many people I don't like.”

Jonathan made a darkly amused huff. “Sounds like high school.”

“It _is_ high school! Except I have to wear a tie and everyone has pictures of their children in their wallets. I’m thinking of bending to peer pressure and getting a picture of the kids to pull out. ‘These are my six junior high aged children, I got them in a variety pack – they’re a small army with monster fighting experience.’ 

“‘Oh your son plays little league? That’s great. Mine has been to another dimension – so.’ 

“‘I’m sure you’re very excited for Suzy’s ballet recital. My daughter can move things with her mind – have I mentioned that before? Because it’s just incredible’,” he carried on along the tangent, comparing the various qualities of the kids to the average milestones of their peers. 

He kept going as long as it made them laugh, because he knew they weren’t doing it because of who his father was. Especially when Nancy snorted and nearly kicked him over it.

“I could get you an awkwardly posed picture of them all,” Jonathan offered when they’d all settled into even breaths. 

“Mm!” Nancy’s eyes suddenly lit up. She reached across behind Steve’s shoulders to tap Jonathan’s while she swallowed her mouthful of burger. 

“Show him!” she declared finally, like Jonathan had that exact photo somewhere.

Jonathan laughed. “The kids are a really awkward segue to this – but sure,” he agreed, grabbing up a paper napkin to wipe the grease from his fingers before he stood.

Steve looked back and forth between them, curious and eager all of a sudden at the prospect of seeing something, a part of their days he’d missed out on, whatever had them amused. “What? What is it?”

Nancy smiled at him knowingly, arching her eyebrows as she took a sip of her drink from the wax paper cups with flimsy lids that never seemed to stay settled. Jonathan, meanwhile, went to his backpack, perched on a dining room chair, and claimed a manila envelope from its depths.

“I’m back in the dark room at school again and Nancy and I developed some pictures last week,” Jonathan explained as he came back.

“I was very integral to the process,” Nancy laughed.

Steve’s heart spiked up in rhythm before his head had even fully put together what the pictures could be. To be honest, photos were the sort of thing that came back to Steve as a surprise every time. Someone took pictures on a day, and some ages later when he’d forgotten all about the wonderful time he’d had, someone would put the pictures in his hands, and just like that those days were back.

He followed Jonathan’s lead and wiped his hands clean, and just a moment before the envelope passed into his hands he realized what they were with a delighted certainty. His mouth curved into a crooked smile. “Are these…?”

Jonathan just smirked, which was as  good as an answer. “I thought I could keep them in the drawer in your bedroom.”

Steve tipped the envelope so a slim stack of photos eased into his palm. “That’s a very good use of your drawer,” Steve said. “Lots of room for more in there, too.”

There they were, him and Nancy pressed together, not all taken on the same day but all taken with the same adoring sense of care. Steve had seen skin mags before, images of things far more raunchy, and he had certainly done things more raunchy that what the pictures depicted, but still he flushed when he looked at them. He was pleased and warm at seeing them both bared and together, and seeing Jonathan in the way they were taken.  

“Except this one,” Steve said, lifting up one where Nancy’s head tipped back, her fingers gripped in his hair, it was mostly his shoulders and her arm, and still there was something breathtaking about it. Maybe it was just because that was them, that moment caught and kept as precious as it had felt. “This one we should frame.”

Nancy grinned, full of vindication Steve didn’t understand, and looked at Jonathan. “I _told_ you!”

“You’re both degenerates,” Jonathan sighed, a note that lamented how much he loved them despite their deep flaws.

Steve chuckled and continued to leaf through the photos. “True. But we make it look good.”


	10. October 1985

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gang talks about feelings some more, and also doesn't talk about feelings some more. Wink.  
> Billy definitely doesn't miss Steve and is a reliable narrator you should always believe.  
> The mood for this chapter is 'soft' (except for Billy, his mood is 'tastes like blood')

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back atchya with another chapter! Thanks for all the kind support, it means the world and keeps me going. I hope everyone has a Happy Halloween!  
> Warning: Billy is his standard amount of awful.

**Jonathan**

“Here’s a thought,” Jonathan said as Steve opened the door. “I don’t apply to NYU. I don’t go to university. I live in the woods.”

Steve scoffed, taking the milk crate weighed down with photographs out of Jonathan’s arms. “And prove everyone right? Not your style.”

Jonathan smiled bleakly at that, following Steve inside. Steve’s place was a strange mixture of his parent’s decorating and Steve’s own organized chaos. Jonathan could count on one hand the number of times he’d been inside of Steve’s parents’ place and he liked it that way. That house had always felt like a Venus fly trap - inviting, but only to serve a purpose. Steve’s place was different. Despite the fact that a lot of Steve’s parents could be seen in the furniture, it felt like you could actually sit on it. Like it was actually lived in.

“Nancy’s running late, her mom needed her for something. But she’ll be here,” Steve said, putting the crate down on one of the six chairs staggered around the dining room table.

Six. Steve lived alone. Jonathan would wonder if Steve’s parents knew about them, or at least suspected, but that would involve them taking an interest in Steve’s life besides him becoming his father’s protégé. They were just ostentatious. In the two months Steve had lived there, they all just ate piled on the couch or standing around the kitchen, like they didn’t know what a chair was. Jonathan wondered if the table ever got used in the traditional sense, or if it was always just a hub of projects, a surface to pile groceries on the way to the kitchen.

Steve had cleared off the table and laid down a tablecloth (or possibly a bed sheet; Jonathan was willing to bet on bed sheet) so that they could lay out his photography and help him decide on his portfolio pieces. Mostly because Jonathan was about ready to shred all of it if he was left alone and his mom kept saying, “that one is incredible,” with unwavering enthusiasm to every single photo. Sweet, but not necessarily helpful.

“All right,” Steve said, clapping his hands together. “How do you want to do this?”

Jonathan opened his mouth to reply but Steve pointed in his face with gentle admonishment. “And don’t say ‘not’, because we’re doing this. You’re super talented, you’ve been dreaming of this since forever, and if we don’t go after the things we want then why bother waking up in the morning.”

Jonathan closed his mouth again, biting back on the cynicism that crawled up his throat in a knee jerk reaction to encouragement. Steve’s optimism always sounded like they’d been picked out of fortune cookies and motivational posters to Jonathan, but he’d come to know that he believed what he said. Steve loved clichés and Jonathan was coming to see them as classics.

Steve smiled, satisfied, and dropped his hand. “That’s the spirit,” he chirped, turning back to the milk crate, picking up a stack of photos with gentle hands, holding on to the edges to keep from marring them with fingerprints.

Jonathan stood there with the stiff discomfort of an artist being critiqued, and Steve had eyes only for the photographs. He put each one down on the table carefully until his handful was empty. His dark eyes flipped from photo to photo. He looked at Jonathan’s work the way he looked at Nancy, Billy Hargrove and - Jonathan realized all at once - the way he looked at him, too. It had always seemed different when pointed at him directly.

“You’re so damn talented, we’re going to be here for a while,” Steve laughed with a shake of his head. “I’ll go put on the coffee. We’ll start a ‘No’ pile, but I get veto rights on your stupid self-hating-artist decisions,” he carried on, and pushed off from the table to disappear into the kitchen, leaving Jonathan staring after him.

“Just black for me,” he finally called towards the kitchen when he realized he hadn’t said a word since stepping through the door.

“You got it,” Steve chimed and returned quickly, the coffee set to brew. Steve sat down in a chair next to the one occupied by Jonathan’s photography and claimed another handful. “You gonna sit down or just hover and drip talent silently?” he asked, nodding towards the seat next to him.

Jonathan settled into the seat, feeling very much like he’d forgotten how to exist as a human person in time and space. He looked at Steve like he’d never seen him in his life before. When had Jonathan stopped having to speak for Steve to know what he was saying? When had he stopped fighting his compliments and started believing them? Suddenly he ached for his camera, Steve’s face a crystallization of the moment, even as his expression turned slightly bewildered.

“Hey, there will be plenty of time to live in the woods after university,” Steve soothed, misinterpreting what Jonathan’s stare meant. He couldn’t fault him for it though, it was the first of its kind. Jonathan had loved Steve for a while, but this was different.

“You are… inescapably gorgeous, you know that?” Jonathan breathed.

It was Steve’s turn to look dumbfounded, blinking at Jonathan, probably trying to figure out how he’d misheard him. Instead of repeating himself, Jonathan reached out, cupping Steve’s jaw and drawing him in. He kissed him in a slow and easy press of lips.

When he let him go Steve still looked dazed, but in a different way, a flush had coloured his features. “Well… I mean, yeah, I know it,” he fumbled, aiming for casual, tossing an arm over the back of his chair. Jonathan could barely stand how much he adored him right then.

“Let’s take a break,” he laughed, thumbing over Steve’s jaw.

“We haven’t started yet,” Steve answered and when Jonathan twisted his mouth in exasperation, Steve’s eyes lit up with realization. “But I mean - I’m not against a break.”

Jonathan took Steve back to his bedroom because it seemed like the place to do it. When things had first happened with Nancy, it had just boiled over, a rupture of feelings and a sudden, near fatal amount of longing. Things with Steve weren’t like that; they’d built up slowly, a thing that took careful precision to bring to life. So, he chose Steve’s bedroom. Where their drawers lived. Where Jonathan had once woken up to the sound of Steve snoring into his pillow, Nancy somewhere else, and thought that was a very decent way to wake up.

Steve sat down on the edge of his bed, uncharacteristically still, like he was holding his breath and waiting for Johnathan to change his mind. There was a great nervousness in an unmoving Steve, like how most people looked when they fidgeted. There was so much thought paralyzing his muscles in place. Jonathan took a moment to take catalogue of the way his own nerves simmered and found them to be quiet. It may not have been the frenzied grabbing of what was needed that it had been with Nancy, but it was just as clear, just as sure.

Jonathan stepped forward and let his hands find the fond, mirrored places on Steve’s jaw, fingertips eased beneath his ears. “I just want you to know,” he began with all the gravity he could put into words.

Steve sucked in half a breath to add to the hoard he was already keeping in his lungs. He wouldn’t even blink.

“I have no idea what I’m doing.”

All the breath rushed out of Steve in a laugh, and with it the air returned to the room. Jonathan smiled as Steve smiled.

“That’s okay,” Steve said. “I never know what I’m doing.”

The tension lifted like a spell, and Steve brought his own hand up, fingers fitting between the fabric of Jonathan’s t-shirt and his skin. They eased up, gentle but untimid, until Steve’s palm lay flat to the warmth of his skin. They stayed like that for a moment, the rest of Jonathan’s skin goose bumped with the interest of being touched as well, of being included in the newness of it.

“I don’t believe that,” Jonathan said, before he kissed him.

He wondered if it was supposed to be different. If he should have been able to _feel_ the maleness of him, a difference to validate all the fuss over whether or not he’d ever kiss another boy. But it was just a kiss. A kiss that tasted like more.

They made it to the mattress like a jump cut, there were reservations and light exploratory touches, and then they were tangled up and horizontal, skin touched skin and more skin as shirts were pulled out of the way.

Steve kissed like he had something to prove. Jonathan found himself a little delighted by his striving. He felt blind in the middle of the situation instead of behind the viewfinder of his camera, but Steve’s touch said _welcome home._ Jonathan hoped his own hands answered _thank you for waiting._ In time they would say _easy, you’re enough,_ but for now Jonathan was pleased to let him show him what he’d been missing.

Despite the fact there was nothing earth shattering about lowering himself down on top of him, there were subtle differences between Steve and Nancy. He was taller for one, and his cock was a warm, rutting pressure against Jonathan’s thigh for two. It was easier to guess what to do with him than it had been with Nancy - they were the same make, if not model, after all. Though there was a dizzying sense of backwardness, like he was trying to touch himself but in a mirror, his fingers confused when he began to undo Steve’s jeans.

They spoke in fractured sentences.

“Can I –”

“Yeah, just –”

“Is that –”

Words got lost in moans and on lips and were forgone for the lovely little tremble he could coax through Steve if he touched this spot or that spot just so.

They pressed together in that hapless teenage way. Jonathan attempted to wrap his hand around both of them, skin to heated skin. It didn’t really work, but it looked so good to try, and the friction of their contact was not choosy about _how_ it played out. It had all the fumbling of a first time, but it felt good, and Jonathan expected nothing less.

Steve himself was different than he was with Nancy, too. Not in the cut and dry way that one might think; he was not dominating with Nancy and submissive with Jonathan. Nancy took the lead plenty, and Steve touched him like he was a hard won prize, something he’d wanted and claimed with his grasp.

It was just...

Steve was a physically affectionate person. He kissed the inside of Nancy’s wrist when she tried to fix his hair in the mall, and he scooped her up to keep in his lap when they sat together, and he showed his love for her in all the places he was allowed to touch her.

Jonathan’s reservations had been a silent barrier between them. Though Steve had never stopped loving him from within the boundaries Jonathan kept, his native love language now babbled out of him, endearingly disorganized with the excitement of using it. He kissed adoration into him and touched his skin with affection, and all his actions were poetry whispered hastily to the miracle of nerve endings under skin.

When he touched Nancy, he was reiterating a declaration he made in front of the world. On Jonathan’s skin, he wrote a private love letter.

The earnestness of Steve touched Jonathan more than anything else, and that was present when he touched Nancy, too. He could not imagine him like this with Billy. This was a moment that belonged only to them, even if the actions were reused.

Jonathan rocked their bodies together at a slow, even rhythm until Steve’s raucous heartbeats matched it. He came apart gasping against Jonathan’s shoulder, and Jonathan was just a little smug at how quickly it had come to pass. Or perhaps he was just pleased with him, warm and buzzing and so beautifully undone.

Jonathan rolled onto his back, feeling the whole world beneath him in that moment. Steve had made such a mess between them, when he wrapped his hand around himself it slicked his motions and the thrill of that nearly finished him.

“Wait,” Steve said, his touch feather light on Jonathan’s wrist and his tone not much more. “Let me.”

It was a funny set of words, both a command and a plea for permission. Jonathan watched Steve lower himself down until he could feel his breath warm and teasing against him. He looked up at Jonathan with that intoxicating earnestness, and if Jonathan had any reservations, they were erased completely. He moved his hand back and let Steve complete the final lines of his love letter.

The last thought that made it through Jonathan’s mind before he came in Steve’s mouth for the first time was that this, too, would be a very decent way to wake up.

**Nancy**

The house felt no different when Nancy bounded up on the front step, excited to get away from the rest of the world besides the three of them. That little pocket of perfect reality. Getting away from her mother, who had used a shopping trip as an excuse to corner Nancy about her college choices, and the fact that if she’d just get her driver’s license she could commute from home.

No, thanks.

She let herself in and found a strange sort of emptiness to the space. The layout of Steve’s place allowed one to see right back to the kitchen with just a step or two to the right. The full length of the living room and dining room was open, and the sliver of kitchen shown through the doorway was empty. Despite this, Jonathan’s photos had started to be laid out on the table and Steve’s car was still parked in the driveway.

“Hello?” she called, stepping in slowly. Worry had not fully made a home in her mind, merely peered in, took stock of the exits and possible weapons.

With the muffled response of voices and tumbling bodies, Jonathan and Steve appeared out of the hallway that lead to Steve’s bedroom. Their hands weren’t straightening their clothes or hair, but something about them seemed freshly pulled apart. A spark of curiosity flared in her, her eyes roving them. She didn’t know why she knew, just that she knew. The unfamiliar thrill of it lit emotions up in her one after another like Christmas lights, her heart beat quickly as she took them in. 

“Hello! Hi! Hey!” Steve answered, trying not to give them away – which was endearing, the way he protected Jonathan’s time to process. Nancy fought to keep from smiling to do the same, but Jonathan saw through them both, flicking his gaze between them before shaking his head.

“So Steve and I –” he paused, considering his words, trying to choose them carefully.

The beginning of the sentence was all the permission Nancy needed to bound forward.

“You think you could have waited for me? Jeez!” she teased with only a grain of true disappointment in the sentiment. 

It made sense that it happened while they were alone, and she knew without having to ask that it had snuck up on them both. 

She threw her arms around them in a congratulatory gesture. She didn’t know what the occasion called for - a toast? A cake? Right then she just wanted all of the details. She circled between them, catching their arms into hers.

“Sorry, you were saying?” she directed at Jonathan, who only laughed and shook his head again, refusing to bother. Steve on her other arm couldn’t rearrange his face into anything but a smile. Uncharacteristically quiet, he seemed concerned with letting more go than Jonathan was comfortable with.

“Well, look at him,” Jonathan finally said, gesturing at Steve as though that answered it all. “That hair? Who could resist.”

“You, for nearly a year,” Steve said and then flushed a little, hoping it didn’t come out mean.

“Clearly you were doing something different with your hair,” Jonathan deadpanned.

Nancy interrupted, pressing a kiss to both of their cheeks. They’d been three since they’d made the decision to be three, but this development glowed on her skin like a warm touch. She drew back to look at the beginnings of their attempt to organize Jonathan’s photograph collection. 

“Are we sure he didn’t do it just to avoid picking portfolio pieces?”

“Yes,” they replied in unison, a little defensive, going slightly pink. How she loved them both just then.

Smiling, pleased, she returned her attention to the photos. “Good,” she said, and took up a handful of photos, laying one of her and Steve sitting a foot apart looking clothed and abashed in black and white off in her own private ‘Yes’ pile, not sure of the system Steve and Jonathan had concocted. “Because we are getting through these tonight.” 

They sat around the table and drank coffee out of dainty little mugs Steve kept meaning to replace with more sizable alternatives. They sorted through Jonathan’s photographs and made each other laugh because they were strung out on caffeine and the charged undercurrent of change. College and sex and their whole lives sprawled out ahead of them.

Nancy watched them. She didn’t really mean to, but she couldn’t help it. She was looking for a difference. This nasty little thought gnawed at her, the idea that maybe with this step they wouldn’t need her anymore. That somehow she was only a catalyst and was used up in the starting of something else. She put herself between them to see if they resented it. She touched them to remind them she was there.

The more she looked at them, though, the more she was enamored with them, strangely proud of them, full of the kind of happiness that didn’t feel like it should be allowed. They kept her between them. Steve kissed the shell of her ear, and Jonathan allowed her legs to drape over his lap. His hand rested on her knee and his thumb made slow circles on her skin that carried her mind to much more pleasant places.

Her worries did not stand up to their reality.

“I’m going to gouge my eyes out if we have to look at any more of this crap,” Jonathan said at one point. Steve and Nancy both rose to correct him. His photographs were beautiful. Even if he’d outright rejected her very good suggestion that he should use some of the photos from the drawer. It had been a little sweet to watch him go so red over it.

All the same they moved to the living room, abandoning the piles but bringing their coffee with them. It had stopped being late and started being early. Steve, who had presumably started drinking coffee to pass the time at work, dozed off nearly the moment he was off of the hard dining room chairs. For such a tall boy, he could curl up so incredibly small.

Nancy and Jonathan watched him for a moment in a silence that wanted for nothing.

“I would have told you if I thought it was going to happen,” Jonathan said. He turned his head to look at her before he said it. Both of her boys were forged out of good intentions. Even if they held that in common with the path to Hell, she adored them for it. “It wasn’t like I was waiting for some opportunity. If I was, I would have told you.”

Nancy smiled and put down her coffee mug, which she held at the sides instead of the stupidly tiny handle that only accommodated one finger comfortably. The coffee in it was tepid at best by then. She took her hand that was scarred at the palm from goading monsters and pressed it into his hand, against the matching scar. This action said _I know_ so she didn’t have to.

Instead her lips made the words she was dying to ask. “How was it?”

Jonathan glanced away, back to Steve, folded up and sleeping. He didn’t redden, but he was trying to hide a smile. She caught the corner of it, could hear it in his voice. “Good. Familiar. Like I’d been walking around with a headache, and didn’t know I was thirsty before I took a sip and couldn’t stop from finishing it.”

Nancy loved how he was with words, careful and poetic. He used words like he was trying to make a picture with them. Photography made sense for Jonathan, it would take him where he wanted to go, communicate with the world like he wouldn’t be able to manage otherwise.

“We didn’t – I didn’t –”

He paused. She hadn’t expected him to continue and apparently he hadn’t, either.

“We didn’t _go all the way,”_ he finished, putting one handed air quotes around it in a self-deprecating sort of way.

Nancy’s imagination lit up with this. She knew it had shone through her eyes because Jonathan’s mouth had taken that amused twist that it did whenever he thought she was being particularly unsavory. He seemed to appreciate it when she was unsavory and she appreciated that about him.

A moment ago it had been sex in the amorphous sense of the word. The sex ed, hookup point, she-bought-a-red-bra-for-it sense where it was censored in its unexplored nature. Its happening more important than the how of it. A detail made it something kept behind a beaded curtain in the video store, and Nancy wanted behind the beaded curtain.

“Oh, well, how far did you go?” she pried gently, her tone falsely light and they both knew it.

Jonathan smiled at her, looking at her in a way that somehow made her aware he had been looking at her for a long time before she had looked at him.

“I love you,” he said.

It was not the first time he said it. Sometimes she made him laugh and it would be startled out of him. Sometimes he breathed it onto her neck when sleep was so close it could have been a dream. Sometimes he took her hand and sighed it at her like a confession he could not bear to hold in.

But he did not say it often, and when she said she loved him he did not always return it back to her in the same configuration of words. It was not that he didn’t love her or did not feel it always, it was that Jonathan was careful with his words and sometimes that kept him from what he meant.

Sometimes, instead, he would tell her she was brilliant or terrifying or beautiful. Sometimes he would tell her he wanted to hang pictures in a house with her one day. Sometimes he just looked at her like he’d been looking at her long before she’d ever looked at him.

There were photos of her hands, and the distracted profile of her face with her hair a mess on the top of her head, and her lips parted to speak to him spread out on the table. She knew what they meant, but still she blossomed in hearing it. That impossible happiness seemed so big that its permanence was called into question. A soap bubble astonishingly large and fragile, a pane of glass so uninterrupted it seemed to dare the world to shatter it.

“I love you too,” she answered, even though when he said it he was not beckoning a response.

“I know,” he said, because he already had the scar on his palm pressed to hers. “I was sort of convinced that I was immune to crushes before you. I thought that it was impossible to even _like_ someone so quickly. I thought everyone just exaggerated to make their lives seem big when they were small. But I met you, and it was like I understood why someone would ever bother to write a love song.”

Nancy squeezed his hand like he squeezed her heart. Biting into her lip, she wondered how her poisonous thoughts had ever had the gall to form in the first place.

“And there was all that part in the middle, where you loved Steve and I thought that was it for me...” he rolled his eyes as he spoke before looking at her again. “And then you were back and you were brave and thought all these big things about love. And I have to admit, I sort of thought it was bullshit – but you were my lightning strike, you’d proved me wrong before. I didn’t think it was impossible for you to love us both. I just thought it was impossible for me to love anyone but you.”

Jonathan closed his eyes, but kept talking. “But I love him and I wouldn’t have known that if I didn’t love you, if I didn’t get the chance to see him through you loving him and him loving you – and it makes me love you more. I guess what I mean is thank you. I didn’t know any of this was possible and so I thought it was impossible.”

Somewhere between feelings and fingertips and this crazy idea that maybe, just maybe, it could work out if they tried, they’d managed to become a three legged stool. A tripod. The whole thing stood up because they were all in it. They felt solid and unshakable. They were three.

The happiness in Nancy clung to her eyelashes like dew drops she had to blink away very fast. She wanted to say something funny, or a little rude, so they’d both laugh, but the sincerity of the moment was thick in her throat. In a distant future where she told this story, she’d have all sorts of funny things to say, but in that moment there was only the one thought her tongue could translate.

“I love you both so fucking much I can hardly stand it,” Nancy sighed, wiping her eyes with the heel of her palm. Their silence had wanted for nothing and now it was overfed, filled to bursting with tenderness no words needed to tread on. Jonathan kissed her, on the back of her hand, and on her temple, and on her lips, until they both forgot that they were wide awake.

Steve snored quietly beside them, the clocks of the house echoed each other disconjointedly, a chorus not well practiced enough to harmonize. They all agreed that they should go to bed, though.

Nancy and Jonathan coaxed Steve to the edge of consciousness and onto his feet, guiding him until they could all collapse in a heap on the bed. There was a brief negotiation of limbs and blankets, clothing chucked onto the floor, and then they were all still and quiet in the dark.

“Hey, Jon,” Nancy whispered. 

“Mm?” 

She smiled, because she was joking, but also because she wasn’t at all. “How far did you get?” 

**Steve**

“How are we supposed to go on dates?” Steve asked by way of nothing.

At the time he was standing on one of the dining room chairs that was being used to supplement his height so he could put up the miles and miles of orange and black paper chain the children had foisted on him. He made a good show of complaining about it, but he was still hanging it up, and had gone so far as to procure some rubber bats and fake cobwebs to further usher Halloween into his living room in particular.

Steve was not entirely sure how he’d come to this tangent in his mind, the thought needling him out of nowhere with a severe insistence. Somewhere between the thought of how many people would fit in a Ferris wheel seat and whether he was now too old to dress up for Halloween, it had appeared and derailed the already chaotic train of thought.

Nancy, who was elbow deep in pumpkin guts, blew her bangs from her face and looked up at him. “How do you mean?”

“I mean with three of us, how are we supposed to go on dates? Dates are all set up for two people.”

“We’ve gone on dates,” Jonathan said. He was laying out on the floor alongside Nancy and her massacre of the pumpkin. He refused to clean it out on the grounds that he had to do the ones for his house, and that was already three too many sets of guts to touch. He was, however, on standby to carve it as Nancy dictated, which was their compromise. The room smelled like the hollow, sweet smell of raw pumpkin.

“What? Where was I on these dates?” Steve demanded.

He didn’t mean for things to feel more official after he and Jonathan hooked up, but it did. He wanted to be gloriously evolved and content with their relationship no matter what shape it took, but he was reassured by the step they’d taken. Perhaps official wasn’t the correct word; maybe settled, or secure.

“Sitting next to Nancy so I wouldn’t dead arm you for being a movie talker,” Jonathan supplied, and Nancy nodded, agreeing both that they had been dates and that Steve was in mild danger while watching a movie with Jonathan.

“Those weren’t dates! Everyone paid for themselves, no one was dressed up,” Steve rebuked with a dismissive wave of his hand that nearly dislodged all the chain he’d already hung up, but he saved it from disaster at the last moment.

Nancy laughed, amused, smiling up at him. “Oh, Steve, do you want us to take you on a date?” she teased.

“No,” Steve answered, taping the last loop up. “I want to take you guys on a date.”

There was a silence that was soft with fondness behind him, and when he turned around to look at the two of them, they were sharing some sort of amused conversation in glances. They turned to face him with identical smiles.

“Stop that,” he commanded, hopping down onto the couch, making his way over to drape himself over the back so he was closer to the two of them.

“Stop what?” Jonathan asked with a falsely imperious tone. He knew exactly what ‘that’ Steve was referring to.

“Stop looking at me like I’m like some sort of puppy tripping on my own ears,” Steve explained, resting his chin to the tops of his folded arms.

“Stop being an adorable puppy, then,” Nancy said, sticking her tongue out at him. He returned the gesture. They were the pinnacle of maturity.

“We can do anything that we want to do for a date, it’s not like anyone can stop us. Whatever you can do with two people, you can do with three,” Jonathan pointed out.

“I think you can only fit two people in a Ferris wheel seat,” Steve hummed.

Nancy and Jonathan laughed at this, and Steve smiled against the skin of his wrist.

“Good point, we’ll avoid Ferris wheels,” Nancy said.

“We’d still fit on the teacups,” Jonathan said, moving to sit up.

This satisfied Steve and the nagging feeling inside him. “Hell yeah, we’re teacup people now. That’s a better way to go in circles anyways.“So,” Nancy said, her attention split between the wet scrape of a spoon in pumpkin flesh and the topic at hand. “You’re taking us to the fair so we can flaunt our very modern relationship on the teacups?”

“Dreadfully modern,” Jonathan echoed with a teasing note that was dampened slightly with the way he grimaced at the sound of the spoon winning the argument with the pumpkin.

“Yeah – like a proper date,” Steve said. “I’ll pay, we’ll get dinner first, and then make ourselves sick on funnel cake.”

“Sounds dangerous once the high-velocity spinning is involved,” Nancy said, but not like she objected.

“Does that mean you’re also going to be winning us a bunch of junk on carnival games, because I opt out in that case,” Jonathan mused. Steve could not be entirely sure he did not say this because being taken on a date was sort of a foreign concept to two out of the three people present and Steve had made this maneuver to keep himself in his comfort zone. But he was also the one with a full time job, and the one who was just dying to do something for the two of them.

He knew that people at school had been trouble for them. That Billy was more than likely one of them. He knew it in the frayed ends of conversations that cut off when he walked into a room. Steve knew he couldn’t make that stop, and he just wanted there to be more good that being together created than bad.

“We can skip that part,” Steve said magnanimously.

“Pfft, _I_ will be winning you both the worst possible junk and you’re gonna like it,” Nancy interrupted, slopping out the very last of the pumpkin guts.

When they all got laughing together it filled a space, left a pleasant echo on the spot. Sometimes when Steve was the only one home, he’d look around and would not see the furniture or the rooms so much as jokes they’d shared in physical space. They’d leave their echo on the rest of the world as well. More good than bad.

“Alright, pumpkin carver,”  Nancy said, tapping the pumpkin with her knuckles to hear the hollow noise that resulted. Jonathan sat up, called to action. “Carve me a teacup. So we can flaunt our very modern relationship.” She grinned and leaned over to kiss his cheek.

“Dreadfully modern,” Steve echoed.

Jonathan collected up the kitchen knife he’d chosen for the task and tipped the pumpkin to examine its surface and try to sort out the best place to start. His gaze wandered up to catch Steve’s, and Steve grinned against his wrist again, so pleased with the way their lives had played out.

He gestured non threateningly with the kitchen knife, a loose wristed emphasis of his point more than a jab with a weapon. “I’m not dressing up,”

“I’ll love you anyway,” Steve answered.

It came out casually, slipped between his teeth like a draft and chilled his spine. It wasn’t untrue, and it wasn’t like Steve was shy with the word, but Jonathan was and he didn’t want the first time he heard it out of Steve to be the unsuspecting jolt of stepping into a bear trap. He pressed his lips together, Nancy’s eyebrows arched up, trying to be nonreactive, but the whole scene stopped for a moment. The bell had been rung.

Jonathan held his gaze for a second, another second, so many all linked together like a chain that grew heavier with each addition.

“Well I’d _hope_ so,” he answered incredulously. His laugh cut the current of electric nerves that had shouted down Steve’s pulse. Again, he wanted to be evolved, to have felt the connection all along, but all he could feel was how different it was. How true and good it felt now.

Nancy leaned over and kissed Jonathan, took his mouth and his amusement and pressed it to hers. She was careful not to touch him with her hands, sticky with pumpkin guts, neon orange under her nails. He liked the way they kissed, it still ached through him in the best ways and filled him up with longing.

Nancy got up and came to Steve, carrying the kiss on her lips and put it on his. Maybe she’d just wanted to kiss them both before she went and washed her hands, but it felt like she’d brought him a kiss, brought him this boy and herself and he would never stop being grateful.

He caught her elbow before she could pull away and kissed her again, just for her.

**Billy**

The leaves turned colour, like a late stage bruise, red and brown and gathered on the ground like a postcard. ‘I wish you were here’ could be plastered in looped font all over the whole stupid town. It annoyed Billy because in California the seasons didn’t bother with such gaudy changes. It reminded him where he was, and where he wasn’t. It showed time was passing, but too slowly. 

How many more months of this?

Like the leaves, the game with Jonathan was getting old. Even when he _knew_ he’d gotten under his skin, Jonathan gave him little to nothing. He could not be goaded into a fight. He was not Steve. He had it in him to be such a snarky, miserable little shit, but he would just stare through Billy. He didn’t ignore Billy, no, he just didn’t dignify him with a response. He disarmed him in his inspection.

Billy shoved him against the lockers, Billy leaned against his desk, Billy called him a faggot, Billy murmured softly all the things that he would do to Nancy given the opportunity.

They’d both known that one was bullshit. 

Billy was grasping at straws.

Jonathan was bothered but unaffected, all the wounds were superficial. Jonathan just seemed to tally off the days on the walls inside his head like Billy was doing.

He was losing his touch.

He ached to break something.

Maybe Billy would jump Jonathan, maybe he’d move on to pulling Nancy’s ponytail instead, maybe he’d see how far the half tank of gas he had would get him exactly. Probably not far enough to get away from the autumn leaves.

Billy had been preoccupied with the balancing of hours on the weekends. He had to be out of the house a certain amount of time so he wouldn’t get hit, and he had to be in the house a certain amount of time so he wouldn’t get hit. There was a sweet spot, somewhere, he was sure. He’d yet to find it, but it probably existed. Probably.

But of course, being out of the house on the two days of the week Steve was a free roaming entity held its own snares and snags. Avoiding being out and about in the event he’d run into Steve felt like some admission of defeat. Sometimes the people he spent his hours with on the weekdays made him want to drive a butter knife into their throats and then his own. Everything was a juggling act.

His kingdom for a distraction.

He’d driven himself downtown on the pretense of getting more cigarettes, even though he still had a pack. He briefly considered smoking them all to justify the trip but thought better of it.

He parked behind an ice cream stand that was boarded up with plywood for the season. Brown grass grew through the pavement, the sky was blue in a way that made everything brighter beneath it, and the air was ‘crisp’ according to every person he had the misfortune of running into. This was what rural people called too cold for short sleeves so they had something to talk about.

According to the residents of Hawkins, the leaves did not change colours anywhere else.

Jonathan Byers walked by his car. Hands in his pockets, head ducked. For someone who flinched so rarely, he walked like he was used to doing it. Maybe that was _why_ he flinched so rarely; he was jaded to the experience of cruelty. Billy didn’t like the idea of having anything in common with Jonathan. Besides, Billy stood straighter because of it, he owned a room because of it. He refused to be a prey animal. Maybe he couldn’t find the balance that would keep his father off his back, but he forged the balance that kept everyone else off.

Because Jonathan was a prey animal and Billy was not, he got out of the car and whistled at him. One long note that took a sharp turn upward, it cut through the ‘crisp’ air and echoed off the cracked pavement. Jonathan turned his head enough to catch sight of Billy and notably rolled his eyes as he carried on.

“Byers,” Billy shouted, though he knew he knew was there. Still he followed him, cutting him off before he turned onto the main street. Jonathan’s steps faltered back to prevent a collision. The retreat felt like something. Having him alone on this side street felt like something. Full of possibilities, his mind churned them out with a sort of relish that vaguely concerned him.

“I don’t have time for this,” Jonathan said, but his hands unfolded themselves from his pockets. Smart boy.

“Time for what? I haven’t done anything to you yet,” Billy answered, cocking his head, taking him in, grinning. The yet was a promise.  

“Whatever this is – are you going to kick my ass? Because I’m meeting my mom in like –” he checked his watch, “– fifteen minutes.”

No, not violence, that was easy, familiar, and was giving him exactly nothing at this juncture. He laughed. “No, and I’ll let you get to your mommy on time. I can drive you. Has anyone ever told you you’re paranoid?”

“I prefer realistic,” he answered. He shifted on his feet like he wanted to bolt, glanced behind him. “I’m not getting in your car.”

“Because you’re paranoid?”

“Because it’s the beginning of a news story.”

This was nice, catching him out of the school had coaxed some sort of rise, the snark. He had not been prepared for an attack in this place and it unfooted him, and the lack of an attack only made it worse. It fed something that had been starving inside of Billy.

“Local teen get a ride,” Billy said, splashing his hand out to emphasize the words on a hypothetical newspaper. Jonathan didn’t jolt when his fingers spread in the space beside his face. He was wound too tightly to budge. “I know you hicks don’t get up to much, but that is as dry as it comes.”

Jonathan was starting to slide away from him again, his jaw angled with the clench of his teeth but his gaze drifted through Billy like a ghost. The novelty of their setting had only gone so far, the ruts of this habit were too familiar for Jonathan, he sunk back into them. Billy had to do something else.

“How’s Steve?” Billy asked, though he did not really want to know.

Well, he did, he just didn’t want to know from any source other than himself, but that was neither here nor there.

This was both the right thing and the wrong thing, but it wrung a reaction from him. It wrung a reaction from Billy too, but he ignored it. He was good at being self destructive.

A flicker of surprise opened up Jonathan’s features before they abruptly snapped closed again, his eyes narrowed, his brow crinkled, and his mouth tugged down into something like a grimace. Billy recognized it as possessiveness. A wildfire had asked after something precious and flammable, something that had burned before, and Jonathan had locked him away in his mind.

The wildfire grinned.

Possessiveness felt appropriate, it made sense to Billy far more than Nancy dictating _where_ he left marks instead of whether he left them. “He is good, isn’t he? Good ol’ King Steve,” Billy hummed, stepping forward.

“I mean, I know it – what’s the word – intimately? Biblically? Come on, help me out here, AP English partner.” Billy really wasn’t sure what he wanted out of this, just that the momentum of it was taking him somewhere, giving him something. The reckless speed of it made it more dangerous to look back, to flinch.

Jonathan stared, but it could no longer pass through Billy, a moth drawn into the fire. He said nothing, but his silence no longer made him impenetrable; he was cracked open. Billy was eager to peer inside.

Billy smiled, and he’d known since puberty, since before that even, what he looked like when he did. The smile that opened the world up for him. It wrapped women around his little finger, melted the knees of girls, and had on more than one occasion coaxed a boy onto his. Jonathan was transfixed, the current of the conversation had clearly carried him out so much farther than he’d expected to be.

“What I’m getting at is, I know he’s good. But he’s not the best. ‘Cause _I_ am the best,” Billy laid out the thought slowly as he took another step closer, the toes of their shoes not quite touching. He was taller than Jonathan, he would be even if Jonathan fully straightened his spine out. Billy liked that. He was a curiosity up close, all harsh lines and mistrust. Billy didn’t really understand the appeal of him, but he was partial the pale span of his throat.

Jonathan’s gaze followed the planes of his face, wandering into the trap of his smile. The wildfire was at his door and somehow he looked just as remote, his features unlit by the blaze. He was deep, still water. Billy just wanted to watch it boil. That was all. He wanted to cause something, to ruin something – same difference.

“Do you want to try the best?”

He did not boil, the water did not ripple. If the wind did not scrape some leaves down the road, Billy would have thought time had stopped working, Jonathan was so perfectly still. His gaze had wandered into the trap of his smile but the trap had failed to snatch him up.

“This is a joke, right?” Jonathan finally managed as he took a step back.  

Right into the wall, if only it were just as painless. Billy’s grin became the grit of teeth. It was an easy shift. He was charming, he was angry, the settings were so well-worn it was easy to toggle from one to the other. Quick as a blink.

“Of course it’s a fucking joke,” Billy snapped. “Jesus, that screw loose really rattles the whole system up, huh?”

He hadn’t really wanted him in the first place, that was the only reason it stung.

He’d just wanted to yank his chain, so it wasn’t really a rejection.

People didn’t reject Billy.

Except when they did. 

This didn’t count though, and that death rattling, air sucking sensation like a plug being pulled from a drain right in the center of his being had no place here. He’d only been fucking around, trying to get a rise. And he’d gotten that much, Jonathan took another step back with a bemused and apprehensive look, his gaze wandering from Billy to the main street and back.

He was trying to see if it would be worth it to run. Billy wished he would, and give him an excuse to introduce him to the pavement. Billy had landed himself in the jaws of a trap instead, to be mad then was to admit there was something to be mad about. He clenched his fists but kept from swinging them.

“Right. I’m going to go now,” Jonathan said slowly.

“Wouldn’t want to keep Mommy waiting,” Billy sneered but he didn’t move.

Jonathan started around him, something about the careful way he went tipped Billy neatly into rage and he shoved him. If he wanted to shrink away from him like he was vicious, he would be vicious. Jonathan went over in a quick jerk of limbs clattering to the ground. His palms were bit up by the gravel in trying to catch himself.

Billy stood over him. “What are you fucking around for? You have places to be, Byers, get your ass up.”

When he shifted himself to get up, Billy kicked him back down. This was the sort of thing that was really better suited to an audience; between the two of them it just looked petty. It was just petty. It reminded him of his father, and that if he was angry, there was a reason he should be angry. That slick slope of rejection sucked him downwards into fury even if he insisted it didn’t belong there. It went so much deeper than he knew what to do with.

There was an ugly disconnect in Billy, the sort that made it very easy for things to go very sideways.

Jonathan landed on his back the second time and kicked out at Billy’s knee. He got his shin instead, but it buckled with the force. It left the dusty tread of his shoe marked against his jeans, and Billy wouldn’t be surprised if it left a bruise to match on his skin.

He wasn’t fucking around. Good for him.

Billy didn’t hit the ground but the imbalance was enough for Jonathan to scramble to his feet and get away to the main road with only a few scrapes.

Something in Billy wanted to chase him down anyways, which was a good way to ruin exactly everything. He stayed put. He bit a hole in his cheek to bear the choking heat of humiliation.

Fuck.

How many more months of this?


End file.
